Tyranny of the Page View Nearly Over?
An AP report
today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will
"scrap rankings" based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at
websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax "increasingly
make page views less meaningful." We've known for some time, but it's big news if a major
stats service like Nielsen/NetRatings officially degrades the importance of page views.
Note that later in the AP article, it states that Nielsen won't be fully scrapping page
views - they "will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them".
The AP article details two cases where this change in focus will provide a noticeable change in bigco rankings:
"Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.
Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third."
You could argue that IM should be counted, as it's a place where advertisers can put their messages. So the 'AOL over Yahoo' case is justified in that respect. However, the Google case is less compelling. Its search engine is primarily built for efficiency and speed, so it seems unfair to judge them based on 'time spent on site'. Advertisers in that case are more interested in page views (or more precisely, relevancy).
How does this affect blogs?
Blogs are a good case where 'time spent' is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the 'quantity over quality' problem. It's easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the 'time spent on site' figures for those blogs and I think you'd find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn't. So in the case of blogs, I'd argue that 'time spent on site' is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.
What Nielsen's Competitors Are Doing
The AP report states that Nielsen's rival, comScore Media Metrix, "addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour." But that doesn't take into account the effectiveness of a site, because again people could be visiting a site due to it being highly ranked in Google - yet when they click through they find rubbish content and so very quickly leave.
Compete (a R/WW sponsor) has a good measure called 'engagement', which measures things like Daily Attention and Average Stay. Alexa measures 'Page Views per user'. So things are beginning to change in the web stats industry.
Conclusion: One Small Step...
On balance I think it will be a step forward if Nielsen does indeed drop page views for 'time spent on site' in its rankings.
It's not yet a totally satisfying change, because with the likes of Google you want to somehow measure relevancy and with blogs you want to measure engagement. But it's at least a step away from page views, which have become too easily exploited - not just by some blogs, but also by the likes of Facebook and MySpace (which both make the user go through extra clicks to get to what they want). What do you think of this change by Nielsen?
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Maybe this will make MySpace finally build for usability rather than page views. There can be no reason other than that to have kept their often bizarre process of changing settings and posting comments etc. Some ajax wouldn't go amiss there!
Yes, and Facebook's "skip this step" process when adding a new friend is another example - you have to land on 3 pages to add one friend, and there is no bulk approval process. There is no logical reason for any of that, apart from it gets FB more page views.
It actually makes more sense. A page view count means nothing if a visitor leaves the web page or the website within a few seconds. In fact there should be a way to rank websites according to time people spend on the websites rather than what content they have and how many incoming links they've garnered. And I'm talking about normal business websites and not Yahoo!, Google or AOL; blogs for instance. A blog's quality should be evaluated by the time people spend reading/viewing various posts.
It’s an interesting change, and one that had to happen so that sites can properly gauge their reach. That said, sites which depend on a CPM advertising model depend on page views to generate revenue, such sites will be less supportive of the change and won’t be eager to take it up as a standard.
Daniel, I take your point about CPM. But as an example: this blog depends on CPM and I've always found the page view model to be frustrating. So I want a change.
Like everyone else, I price my ads based on a certain CPM (which is based, as you say, on page views). But I've always felt that a big part of the appeal of advertising on a niche site like r/ww is the branding value for the advertiser - in other words, the brand fits the community and this has more chance of a) the ad being relevant to readers, and b) advertisers getting brand value plus of course click thrus. It's difficult to measure that 'brand value', but I think 'time on site' would be a better measure than page views. Also for blogs, how many comments it gets is important.
Put another way, the CPP blogs out there (cut-paste-publish) that pump out 20+ posts a day - I would argue their page view count is largely irrelevant to advertisers. Why? Because the blog reputation is poor, content quality is low, time spent on site negligible, and ultimately there is little branding value to be had for advertisers. If I was an advertiser, I'd be very wary of putting my brand on such sites. Sure you hit lots of eyeballs, but how much attention are those eyeballs *actually* paying to both the CPP site and its advertisements? Probably very little.
But then I'm slightly biased ;-)
I agree wholeheartedly that the almighty Page View is finally proving to be less important. Nielsen, a respected audience measurement company is finally doing something about it.
If I spend 20 minutes in my e-mail service -- as opposed to 2 minutes checking my MySpace ... the e-mail service "time spent" is more valuable to advertisers.
Excellent entry! I wrote about this at http://www.joemanna.com/blog/nielsen-scraps-page-views-or-why-you-shouldnt-measure-success-with-one-metric/
So far Google Analytics is working quite well, as it shows me up front the span of time people spend on my site in the dashboard.
~ Joe :)
Sorry, but I think we're just swapping bad measurements. Reading a couple of pages is far more "valuable" than me sitting through a 2:00 clip on Youtube. This "new" measurement seems geared for one thing above everything else: to make video sites more valuable.
Thank God. Finally! I've been waiting for - and expecting - this for some time.
Hi Richard,
It'd be great if someone could clarify with Nielsen/NetRatings if a page sitting open as a tab counts towards time spent. The latest browsers all support tabs and I wonder if they've taken into consideration that open tabs in the background don't really indicate where someone is spending their time.
IMO the metrics is ... unusable. First - take in account if page contains longer text versus shorter text - in both cases reader may read whole page and the second one is worse? Why? Second - the pages with better navigation will get worse statistics - I always hate these corporate pages where you spend half a minute searching for link to find something you want (and now they would get even more credit for it?). And the last one - who cares? I usually open pages in new tabs and leave them open for whole day - people must love me - if 1000 visitors spent 10 seconds on some page and me 12 hours (43200 seconds), cause I don't usually close tabs, average is instead 10 seconds 53 seconds..
I'm glad that they are changing their view on pageviews but I think it is hard for 3rd party sources to be able to accurately gauge what type of traffic a site actually gets.
OK, so page views have been a dead metric for a long time now. But "time spent"? We've been following this debate at GrokDotCom since before Nielsen first made their announcement back in April, but it's interesting to see how this is playing out.
Like Ian & Tristan say, what about tabbed browsing? I think "time spent" is a zombie metric. So what's better, a dead metric or an 'undead' metric?
Although IM applications like AIM have advertising, "time spent" is still totally misleading (and nevermind the fact that the application has nothing to do with AOL.com). And what if I'm logged into my AIM account through iChat, for instance? Does that count as "time spent"? Even if it doesn't, it's still nonsense.
The thing is, there's no one-size-fits-all metric for the Web. But forget AOL, Google and tabbed browsing for a minute... Say there's an ecommerce shop that's built a site that's so poorly planned -- already a stretch of the imagination, isn't it? -- that it takes you 10 minutes longer to find what you're looking for and buy it than it does elsewhere. Should this site rank higher than its competitor's? Nielsen thinks it should.
If time spent becomes more important to executives than engagement and conversion (both idiosyncratic metrics), it has the potential to be far more misleading than the limp page view ever was.
Richard: Thanks for the thought-provoking post. R/WW's always worth the time. :)
I think the concept of measuring the time spent on a website is an interesting idea and one which will prove useful for certain types of ranking. Like Robert said, there is no one size fit all model, and as most of you have pointed out, time spent does have quite a few shortcomings. I don't think Nielsen/NetRating haven't thought this through though. It'll be interesting to see what are the exact criterias for ranking websites. My guess is that it'll a be combination of both time spent and page views, who knows.
I think the thing here is definitely to remember that it's a case of different stokes for different folks.
I think this will have to be looked at "in addition" to other metrics --- the metrics that are most important to me, are not necessarily important to the next guy.
I consider time viewed/spent on my site a good indicator of whats going on, but someone like google would not, their metric would be different based on their "purpose."
I think this will be a case of identifying your most important metrics based on the aim of your site/market/industry and weighting them.
Nice to see though.
This will pretty much hurt everyone.
Unless people are looking at videos, then tend to spend verry little time on pages.
Granted that good content is best - if you don't capture the "short attention span" of visitors in 10 sec's you lose them.
Also - that kills digg and site of the like who drive traffic by having good Comment draw - so it wouldn't help for ranking, but traffic doesn't hurt. ???
I think it is a positive move. At least Nelson is welcoming the new Web2.0 players.
PV or Time spent, it is a generic metric, it will give you a very shallow impression of a certain site like 'people are going there'. it can't tell you what people are doing there.it is just something that the media, advertisers, reviewers,and site managers will care about more. Does a user really care about the Nelson rating of a website that he or she is visiting? How many of you guys know the rating of RWW?
IMO,a website should always stick to its users' need. if you are google, head for relevancy, if you are blogger, head for quality of content, if you are a SNS, helps your users find more friends. that's something you will live on.
Just posted text of some FAQs from Netratings PR that sheds light on how "focus" is measured.
http://cavitate.net/flashpoint/2007/07/nielsennetratings_total_minutes_metric_sounds_nice.html