Good blog.

Thanks.

Kevin

I agree that one should have to opt-in for such things. I also though it should apply to spam. The can spam act assured just the opposite.

It seems that the government would rather have us opt out on e-mail spam. The congressmen and senators represented online marketers and not consumers with the passage of that law. I suppose an executive at Google might use that as justification.

Personally, pre-fetching does not bother me. I have the option of allowing cookies or not, I can turn it off if I wish. I did a quick and dirty poll among some fraternity brothers and classmates. Most want the speed.

Google is a savy and wise company when it comes to meeting the needs of the consumer. It could be that they already know that most people are oblivious to it or, possibly, don’t mind. Regardless, if enough people do object, I am pretty sure Google will reverse its decision.

On the other hand, let’s assume that the vaue of a pageview is 1 cent. (Averaged between sites that run low-value generic CPM advertising at maybe 0.1 cents per pageview and high-value B2B sites where a pageview may be worth as much as $1.)

Of course, there’s only value from a pageview if it’s actually viewed by a human and not just downloaded. Downloads cost, regardless of viewing.

Thus, the quesiton is whether prefetching will make users view an additional page more than 0.3% of the time. I can’t predict what the exact number will be without a huge, cumbersome study, but there is no doubt that faster response times will lead users to view more pages.

By the way, WebTV did something similar in 1997: when the user was accessing a sequence of pages (say, paging through an article that was split over multiple pages), the next one in the sequence would be prefetched to the user’s device.

Is it a partial rollout for now?