AJAX bad for publishers? Don’t think so
The Internet Stock Blog today takes a look at the Myspace issues, from the News Corp point of view and jumps in to the debate on page view inflation and the effects of AJAX on inventory available for ad sales teams. The link trail from the post leads to previous posts by Mike Davidson and Jason Calcanis on the subject.
While Mike argues that Myspace can actually benefit from better user experience, even if it results in reduced pageviews, Jason throws the baby, the bathwater and the entire bath house by saying that AJAX is flat out bad for publishers.
I disagree with that contention. You can very comfortably serve ads in AJAX-heavy websites. Of course, you should not fill up all page transformations and triggers with ads. It is possible to do it sensibly, if you create ad areas in your AJAX interfaces and define when they can change or when they can be counted as an impression.
For instance, a new email being read is technically a page refresh. I don’t understand what stops publishers from inserting an ad there, unless there is some imagined standard that you can’t have advertisements on AJAX pages.
