Hacker News Reader

Not that I'm a big fan of Gawker as a whole, but I want to know who the hell thought it was important for gawker to have an ajaxy interface with ajax page loading of posts.

Its a news site, literally the entire purpose of the site is to show text and (some)pictures, why try to make it fancy?

View on HN

I used to work on a high profile old media site, and based on my experience there, I believe that the motivation is that it's easier to game ad metrics with stupid gimmicks this way. Approximately at the time I had lost hope and was looking for an exit, they were working on a new photo gallery that would count each "next" click as a new page impression. In short, it allows you to muddy the water around what exactly constitutes an "impression."

To be fair, an "impression" isn't really a great metric on a page that people sit on for >1 minute.

The guidelines we worked under at my previous job basically said "if a user action changes a substantial portion of the page, it qualifies as an impression". It seemed pretty fair to me at the time.

Advertisers (especially with rich media) get ridiculous interaction metrics from their creative, they know what people are doing with their ads. Lots of them are happy if an ad sticks on a page for half a minute and is then replaced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com