In a move that had many in the industry wondering whether the page view is dead, Nielsen/NetRatings added the “Total Minutes” and “Total Sessions” metrics to NetView, its syndicated audience measurement service. Is this the best way to measure the popularity of a web site? And what does it mean for site owners, advertisers and web surfers?
Formerly, the Internet rankings company used page views as its metric for determining a web site’s popularity. It will still measure page views, but it will cease ranking web sites by them. Given the changes in technology, many feel that it’s about time the company made this change.
Consider the ways in which the web is used today. So-called Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technologies have improved user experiences to a degree unheard of even two or three years ago. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) permits the content of web pages to be refreshed without reloading the entire page; it’s fast and elegant in action, and growing in popularity on web 2.0 sites with lots of user input. Somehow, just seeing a comment slide neatly into place without a time-consuming page reload never gets old. AJAX is also used for photos, online maps and email among other applications.
And then there are sites with streaming video. YouTube comes to mind, of course, but it’s only the most prominent among countless others. If you’re watching a video for a long time, a web site might fit several ads into your viewing time – but if you use the page view metric, you’ve still viewed only one page.
Online gaming sites have the same problem. I can play my favorite game on PopCap for an hour to unwind after work, and the frame surrounding the game may cycle through several ads. But guess what? That still counts as just one page view, if I understand the metric correctly.
Is it any wonder that Nielsen/NetRatings decided to change the metric for this online popularity contest? The old page view metric was no longer reflecting the reality of how web surfers used the web and engaged with their favorite web sites. The move seems to make good sense from a technological point of view, but it’s important to consider what effect it will have – and to remember that this metric may have its own flaws.
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