RSSAOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking
By Ed Oswald | Published July 9, 2007, 3:56 PM
Nielsen/NetRatings plans to drop its old methods of counting pageviews to gauge Web site popularity, instead opting for a system where it would measure how long a user stays on a site.
With the changing scope of Web content, the old methods are quickly becoming less relevant. More important to advertisers and investors may be how long a user spends on a site, Nielsen seems to believe.
Technologies like AJAX and other dynamic page generation techniques lessen the need for a page to be refreshed, thus decreasing the number of recorded pageviews. Multimedia also carries the same effect.
Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order to figure out site popularity. From this, an advertiser could see how long a site is able to hold onto its users.
Using this method will shake up Web rankings quite a bit. For example, under the old system, AOL was sixth in pageviews. However, using the new system, it is number one with 25 billion minutes spent on its pages in May. The opposite happens to Google which drops to fifth from third using the new method.
Other Web ratings firms also have addressed the problems new technologies pose to metrics with their own systems. For example, comScore now defines its visits as the number of times a person returns to a site with at least a half-hour break between page loads.
Often I'll go to Pandora - http://www.pandora.com/ - as soon as I sit down at the computer and leave a tab open in my browser for several hours. Presumably Pandora will get credit for all that time.
See also http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/
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|Can someone tell me where I can find these ratings?
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|Hmmmmm...
I'm thinking of the average AOL user, you know, the type who thinks AOL IS the internet. I'm imagining it taking them hours to find a link on the page to the next story.
Add in some marginal reading skills and it's easy to see them spending an hour or two on each page. However, it's hard to imagine them having enough money to actually purchase any advertised products.
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|The new system doesn't really seem fair to websites like Google. They are there to give you your information fast, and get you right on to the website you need. I still find myself spending a lot of time on Google, but it's all in short viewings.
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|This opens up gaming the system-- IM's/apps/plugins will find a way to access website & stay connected silently...in background...
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|Wow AOL is finally number one at something.
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|By darkzero63
Wow AOL is finally number one at something.
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Yep, and they've been number one in the past as well in case you didn't realize it.
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|So what does that do for people like me that scan my RSS feeds, open a dozen or so articles in tabs in my browser, and read through them one at a time. It might be 15 minutes before I get to the last tab, and I may look at it for all of 30 seconds.
Just because a page has been loaded for an hour before I close it doesn't mean I am actually looking at it that whole time.
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|Yes. Right now I have 39 tabs open to news stories. (I counted.)
And that last one. I'll probably leave it open
until next thing I browse to.
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|so if they stay under the same base url its only counted a one page view even if they visit say different articles like this site or videos on say youtube?
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|I guess that's why they're switching their methods from counting pageviews to calculating total time. Makes sense especially since you brought up a good point about watching videos like youtube and such.
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