Finally! Nielsen Revises Its Gauge of Web Page Rankings

This changes everything!

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced today, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions of each visitor to a site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

Yahoo and others, however, are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax that allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

Page views also drop as people spend more time watching online video at sites like YouTube, owned by Google.

“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.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives the AOL unit of Time Warner a lift, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranked first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, dropped to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranked third.

Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site “visits” — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/media/10online.html?_
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