Say I go to site “A” and view eight pages, but I never stay on one page longer than 2 seconds (because I don’t see anything that interests me). I go to site “B” and view only two pages, but I spend 8 minutes on each page.

The current system says site “A” is better, more trafficked.

I say that’s just stupid, because on site “A,” I consumed no content or advertising.

I understand your concern; I also do not necessarily agree that trying to count how many photos are viewed is in any way dishonest.

While time spent on a Web site is an important metric – and Soundslide presentations do greatly lengthen that stay – publishers and advertisers want to know about page views. That’s how they measure success.

The photographers at our midsized daily watch the traffic, and when they work on a slideshow presentation for hours and end up with just a few hundred page views for their efforts, that is discouraging. I point out to them the average time a user spends on the page watching the show and also tell them they should multiply the page views by the number of photos in the slideshow to get a true sense of the traffic.

Yet they look at the numbers for the slideshow vs. the page views for a traditional click-and-watch HTML photo gallery and wince.

We are not talking about artificial inflation. We are talking about accurately portraying the actual views our photos are getting in terms our publishers, advertisers and users can understand.

So, we use both forms of photo presentations. Yes, we are working to do a better job of presenting the slideshows to increase traffic and get our visitors used to seeing them – and we’re making headway in those areas.

But to compare the page views of a slideshow vs. a traditional HTML-based photo gallery is disheartening when that is the metric most important for monetizing our Web sites.

Having worked for your competitor, NEWS.com.au, with their first audio slideshows and later on their own advanced multimedia player, I’m quite surprised that you don’t count every image as a page view…

It might be interesting to hear that up here in Norway we are considering a new metric along the lines of “interactive content view” , which will be used for content presented via Flash or Ajax. This way we won’t mess with page views as a traditional core metric.

Rather than generating FAKE page views, I think newspapers should encourage the IT folks to honestly track time spent per visit — and then promote those metrics.

Just my two cents, of course. But I do feel a bit testy when I hear news people cooking up ways to inflate page views. It’s dishonest!

You must be using the component that SS offers.
Check out: http://www2.soundslides.com/wiki/doku.php

If he’s done the former, I’d like to know how. If it’s the latter, I’m deeply, deeply impressed.