According to this WSJ article, page views a a key metric are going the way of the dodo, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Perhaps this will mean the end of long stories spread over six pages in order to generate six additional page views, one of my pet peeves (Slate had a story the other day that jumped to a second page for ONE SENTENCE). The Achilles heel for the advertising funded view of the web is the lack of good data on engagement and true measurement. Companies are willing to spend a lot of advertising money, but at some point will be looking to be able to drive some sort of comparison between online/offline media. As the article says:
At stake is the $17 billion spent annually on online advertising, in part because of the ability to measure the Web audience and their activities in a more exact way than possible with television, radio or newspapers. But spats over the data's accuracy put pressure on the industry to create uniform and trusted standards for measuring Web traffic. Since the early days of the Internet, page views -- in combination with "unique visitor" counts (how many different people visited a Web site at least once in a month) -- have been used to gauge the popularity of online properties and give a rough idea of how many ads people see.
The dream is that the online ads are more measurable. The reality seems to be they are much less so. Until there is a standard in place, that will remain the case.