The problem with unique page views, subscribers or followers as metrics is that they're not scarce enough. It's very easy to friend someone online, and just as easy to ignore most of what they say. LinkedIn references are even worse - the incentive for making a reference is just reciprocity, yet it has the appearance of somehow being more genuine. Some of us might take the time to trim down their friends lists, but most of us won't.
Designing content for engagement (forcing unnecessary clicks just so you can measure them) is wrong - you should not make something less user friendly for the sake of metrics. Eye tracking is a better measurement, and it's already being applied to usability studies. Could we take it a step further somehow, perhaps augmenting eye tracking with continuous MRI scans and facial emotional response recognition? Could we miniaturize such a device and install them *everywhere*?
OK, that's a little creepier than cookie tracking. Plus which, it might not even be that much better. Eye movement isn't always under cognitive control, and one might confuse the moments my proto-brain grabs the wheel with intellectual interest.
What about a complex javascript function? Something that takes inputs we do have (like onmouseover, window focus events, scrolling, zooming) and is able to mathematically determine an attention probability map. I won't pretend for a second that it's a simple calculation - it would need a lot of research papers, community support and intuitively correct outputs. But if it worked, content and service creators could be that much closer to understander their audience and further refine their offerings. If webmasters were willing to anonymously share their data, we could build a content discovery network without any participation bias or random sampling - we'd have the whole population.
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