Paid Content had an interesting riff this weekend on the effect that AJAX might have on online advertising, vis-a-vis the ability to measure AJAX app usage, and, it’s “paradigm shift’ (had to, sorry) away from the standard stateless web-page metaphor.
I’m playing with all manner of UI widgets as we work through the (re)design of Healthdash (and envision at least an early take on how we can make health search easier), and this very thing has been top of mind. We can certainly instrument the UI widgets with reporting hooks… but that doesn’t speak to the potential advertising impact.
More interesting, perhaps, is flipping this around. Will the fear of losing advertising dollars slow the deployment of AJAX in scenarios where it would clearly benefit the user? And, stretching a bit, is there a point at which a UI becomes so frictionless (and differentiated from standard web page models) that a publisher/vendor can make the move from ad supported to user subscription? The latter scenario seems unlikely, and begs the former…
UPDATE: Catching up on my feeds, and low and behold, there’s a post from Jason Calacanis at Weblogs Inc on why he’s not using AJAX. Ad related. (Wish I’d written this yesterday, LOL.)