| Nielsen/NetRatings set to track visits by time, not pages |
|
| by Stephen Withers | |
| Tuesday, 10 July 2007 | |
|
Page 1 of 2   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
"As the Web experience moves further in this direction, the tried and true Page View metric becomes less comprehensive for estimating engagement." According to Nielsen/NetRatings' latest figures, the top five categories ranked by time are email, instant messaging, member communities, online games and current events/global news. The change would appear to favour large sites such as Yahoo that have already adopted AJAX to update pages without user intervention and those like YouTube that deliver streaming video, while disadvantaging 'in and out' sites such as Google's search engine and most news sites, where page views are a much better indication of usage. One visitor may be able to digest an article in ten seconds, while another may take a few minutes to read it. If you produce static content (articles, photographs, illustrations and so on), you don't care whether a visitor spends ten seconds, ten minutes or ten hours looking at a page - the size of the audience is what matters. Is Total Minutes a better metric than Page Views, or merely different? Please turn to page 2.
|
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
