Nielson adopts new web analytic
Online measurement service Nielson/NetRatings has announced that it will drop page views as its most important web analytic - instead adopting total time spent.
The company says that monitoring total time spent by all users will allow it to gauge site popularity more accurately - despite the fact that total number of page views is the metric favoured by the vast majority of web companies.
Sites such as Yahoo are turning towards software such as Ajax, which updates date constantly without refreshing the page. Increasing numbers of sites now incorporate streaming video, which again lowers the number of pages viewed.
"Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total time spent is the best gauge for site traffic," Scott Ross, Nielsen’s director of product marketing, commented.
Page view figures will still be used to measure a site’s inventory - but it will no longer use this metric to formally rank internet pages.
