For years, the page view served as one of our most simple metrics for gauging the size and scale of a web presence. One might call the page view a staple. As you read this, however, the page view is dying a slow death, losing much of its meaning and relevance to discussions about reach, engagement and overall impact.

Why is this happening now, after publishers, media buyers, research and technology companies have learned to rely on the page view as a basic unit of measure? It all has to do with underlying technologies and how they've changed the way we interact with web pages.

In the early days of the web, most content was consumed in page-size chunks. A publisher like ESPN might run a piece about a Florida Marlins game that contained a static box score. The content of the page didn't change materially over time, so it was logical to measure the readership of that particular article by looking at server logs to find out how many times it was accessed. Since a page view is essentially that -- the number of times a page was accessed -- this simple metric became the foundation on which to base our sense of how much traffic a website, a content area or an individual article would receive over time.

These days, however, content is more dynamic. Someone reading up on baseball box scores at ESPN might see that score is updated multiple times as the game is transpiring. Newer technologies allow for people watching the score to see it updated without having to refresh the page they're currently viewing. Thus, multiple exchanges of information can occur within a single page view. This dynamic alters the value equation: one request for information = one page view. What we're seeing is, in effect, page views within page views.

There's another issue with page views, too. Since the industry has adopted page views as a basic metric, various problems have surfaced in deriving intelligence from the data. Since we've been using page views as a surrogate for reach and engagement, sometimes we forget that page views don't necessarily equate to web users requesting content. In a well-publicized case last year, Nielsen//Netratings cut its traffic estimates for financial site Entrepreneur.com when it discovered that pop-up ads served by Entrepreneur were being counted as page views. Cases involving ad campaigns and traffic-driving deals designed to boost traffic numbers are often publicized less. These are the types of problems we encounter when we use surrogates for measurement and lose sight of what really matters to advertisers, publishers and end users.

Author notes: Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.