Nielsen/NetRatings Focuses on Total Minutes - Advertising Effects
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We have to ask what this means for advertisers. Up to now, page views have been a very important metric for many if not most sites, in part because advertisers often pay for ads based on a cost per thousand views (CPM) rate. With such a public statement about the change in the importance of the page view, marketers may need to reconsider how much of their advertising dollars they choose to spend with any particular web site.
Advertisers – and advertising-supported web sites – will not abandon the page view completely in favor of the new metric. If they’re smart, they’ll consider both of those metrics along with others, such as past campaign data, when weighing where to invest their marketing money. Jeff Lanctot, senior vice president for global media at Avenue A/Razorfish, reflects on this matter. “I think what we’ve overlooked is the importance of third-party ad serving, because as you look over time what’s most influential is the rich historical data that digital provides,” he said.
Other companies that measure the popularity of web sites seem to get this. For example, comScore uses monthly unique visitors as an important part of its web site traffic ratings. But it also considers other metrics, such as time spent. Last year, in a nod to the increasing popularity of sites such as YouTube, it began collecting data on video streams.
In theory, it could be argued that web sites with a higher “time spent” metric may be able to charge more for ads on their sites. For those who can remember that far back, this new metric is a reflection of the old efforts in the early days of the web to make your web site “sticky” by finding ways to keep your visitors on your site, whether it was by engaging them with interesting things to do or – sometimes – by making it difficult to leave. But you can’t really tell just how engaged a site’s visitors are unless you have page views as well, to give you some idea of how long per page each visitor spends on the site (assuming that’s a valid measure of engagement). So once again we have to ask: how will this affect advertising? And there are bigger question with the new metric.
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