Nielsen//NetRatings has decided that it is finally time to bid adieu to the longtime metric staple of page views. The aesthetically appealing and experience enhancing programming technique called Ajax is partly to blame for the death of the Web page view’s relevance to measuring just how popular a site is.
Nielsen will begin to measure total time spent and sessions for all visitors to Web sites in order to paint a more accurate picture of which sites are the most popular. This will help just about anyone interested in this type of information, including advertisers, investors, and analysts.
Currently, Nielsen reports average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each Web site it tracks.
The emergence and prevalence of online videos has also become a lethal thorn in the side of the page view metric. Both online videos and Ajax allow visitors to a particular site to view fresh content without refreshing the page, thus rendering the page view metric virtually useless and very inaccurate.
Nevertheless, Nielsen will continue to convey page view figures, though it will not formally rank sites based on these numbers.
"Based on everything that's going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen.
Time Warner’s AOL will see a boost thanks to this change. Based on May data, AOL would leapfrog Yahoo! for the first place spot in terms of total time spent in the U.S. This is partly thanks to AOL’s popular AIM software being included in the calculation of this figure. Using the page views metric AOL would have only been sixth.
Google will drop from third in terms of page views to fifth in terms of total time spent on its sites.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070709/ap_on_hi_te/online_measurements;_
ylt=AtJzwcCUtIybVfR.zYD2LcD6VbIF
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/07/09/nielsen-saying-no-to-page-
view-metrics
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