An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will ’scrap rankings’ based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax ‘increasingly make page views less meaningful.’ We’ve known for some time, but it’s big news if a major stats service like Nielsen/NetRatings officially degrades the importance of page views. Note that later in the AP article, it states that Nielsen won’t be fully scrapping page views - they ‘will still provide page view figures but won’t formally rank them’. How does this affect blogs?Blogs are a good case where ‘time spent’ is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the ‘quantity over quality’ problem. It’s easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the ‘time spent on site’ figures for those blogs and I think you’d find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn’t. So in the case of blogs, I’d argue that ‘time spent on site’ is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

What Nielsen’s Competitors Are DoingThe AP report states that Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, ‘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.’ But that doesn’t take into account the effectiveness of a site, because again people could be visiting a site due to it being highly ranked in Google - yet when they click through they find rubbish content and so very quickly leave.

Source for Post: Clippings.