Web tracker starts timing popular websites

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 10 Jul 2007 at 10:14

Website monitoring service Nielsen NetRatings is replacing page views with minutes spent on site as the most accurate measure of a website's popularity.

Until now, the company has used the page views metric as the ultimate arbiter of a site's popularity. But the company claims that content such as AJAX-based applications and streaming mean people spend longer on a single page, rendering page views an unreliable arbiter of a site's 'stickiness'.

MySpace, for example, has 10.4x the page views of YouTube, but only 3.6x the total minutes spent on site.

"Total Minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and internet applications," says Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen.

The biggest victims of the new counting regime are search engines such as Google, where people quickly flick through a series of results pages but don't spend more than a few seconds on each.

The winners are sites such as AOL and MSN that host applications such as instant messaging and media players. Whether the new metrics will tempt Google to stuff more content onto its homepage remains to be seen.

Top 10 web brands ranked by Total Minutes for May 2007

1. AOL Media Network (25 minutes)
2. Yahoo (19.6)
3. MSN/Windows Live (10.6)
4. Fox Interactive Media (7.8)
5. Google (7.4)
6. Ebay (6.1)
7. Microsoft (3.7)
8. Electronic Arts Online (3.5)
9. Apple (2.8)
10. YouTube (2.1)