Nielsen/NetRatings Focuses on Total Minutes - Changes in Standing
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The differences between time spent and page view metrics may be significant for some categories of web sites, but not others. Let’s look at search engines, for example. Nielsen/NetRatings said the ratio of total minutes spent on Google Search versus Yahoo! Search was 3.3 to 1. Their page view ratio is 3.1 to one. That’s not terribly different.
But when you look at social networking sites, the numbers change considerably. Two of the most popular social networking sites are MySpace and YouTube. The difference in the way web surfers engage with the sites becomes clear when you look at the ratios. When you look at the time spent, you see that the ratio between MySpace and YouTube is 3.6 to 1. When you look at the page views, however, the ratio is downright huge: 10.4 to 1. What’s going on here?
You probably don’t need me to tell you. YouTube’s main focus is videos, and every time someone watches a video, that counts as only one page view for as long as the video is being watched. If you looked solely at the page views metric, you would assume that MySpace was far more popular than YouTube. But YouTube users spend an average of 46 seconds on each page, while MySpace users spend an average of 16 seconds on each page. Whose users are more engaged? Hold that thought; we’ll be coming back to it in the final section of this article.
Search engines actually take it on the chin with the new ranking system. Consider that Google drew the biggest unique audience for May of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, with 110.2 million users. But its raison d’etre is to help people find what they’re looking for and send them somewhere else, so they rank fifth in total minutes. Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live both did better, thanks to their more widely used instant messaging and email applications (yes, Google has both of those, but they aren't as popular).
And which web site now holds the top spot under the total minutes metric? Why, AOL of course. No, I’m not kidding. Ironically, the site ranks sixth in number of page views. Its wildly popular instant messaging application now counts toward the “total minutes” metric used by Nielsen/NetRatings – and I don’t know about you, but I use AIM for work purposes. I’m far from alone. You do the math – or, more precisely, you don't need to do the math since Nielsen/NetRatings just did it for us.
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