Nielsen/NetRatings set to track visits by time, not pages

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 10 July 2007 10:23

Your IT - Home IT

Leading web ratings service Nielsen/NetRatings is about to begin using time spent rather than page views as its primary metric.

"Web 2.0 technologies and publishing models have set the stage for fast, highly-interactive sites that no longer rely on full page refreshes (aka page views) to deliver user-requested content," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing.

"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.