To gather its data, Nielsen monitors about 200,000 panel members, a technique that is clearly informed by Nielsen's method for gathering data about TV viewers. Other metrics companies use data from toolbars, ISPs, and other sources, though Quantcast also gives site owners the option to embed a code snippet on their pages that reports data directly to Quantcast (Hulu does so, for example, and so does RWW).

Stats Need Standards

The real problem here, of course, isn't even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.

We have to take publicly available stats, no matter from which provider, with a grain of salt. In our experience, it is always worth looking at a number of different sources, and while the trends that these services show tend to be relatively trustworthy, the exact numbers are always open for debate.

Nielsen breaks the data down into categories, which is really the most interesting part of their report because it indicates what sort of properties are currently the most popular on the mobile web. The biggest benefactors of mobile were weather and entertainment, categories that each saw a 22% average audience lift when factoring in mobile sites. As Allen Stern on CenterNetworks notes, though, mapping seems mysteriously absent from Nielsen's data.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)
Category	Average Lift (%)
Total	13
Weather1	22
Entertainment	22
Games	15
Music	15
Email	11
Sports	10
Business/Finance	4
Social Networking	3
Search	2
Shopping/Auctions	1
Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet. 1To be read: In Q4 2007, weather sites measured by TotalWeb averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone.

Enter in two or more keywords, like "Clinton vs. Obama vs. McCain," and the graph will display a comparison of those terms using a different colored line for each. A pie chart will also display showing the percentages of mentions for each term throughout the blogosphere.

Tracking the Political Candidates

Beneath the charts are the blog search results for the items, with each term as a separate tab. The graphs themselves are interactive, too - you can click anywhere on the chart's lines to see the articles from that particular date.

Trendpedia also offers advanced search tools from a separate page that let you perform searches using the word "AND"  to search for multiple terms in one search to compare to multiple terms in a separate search. (Example: "twitter and jaiku" vs. "wordpress and typepad and blogger") You can also make your own label for the searches which will appear on the chart that displays. (Ex: "microblogging" vs. "blogging"). The advanced search page also lets you specify which language to cull the search results from, if desired.

Blogging vs Microblogging

After performing the search, you can use the provided social media buttons to share the trend on del.icio.us, reddit, Digg, Facebook, StumpleUpon, or via email. However, a glaring omission is absence of an embed code for pasting the chart onto your blog or web site, forcing you to do screen grabs instead.

Trendpedia is clearly meant to be a competitor to Nielsen Media's Blogpulse, a site which Peter Kim points out appears to be on "auto-pilot." The Blogpulse homepage still features a section called "2005 Year in Review" and the latest news section's last update is from April 2007. Trendpedia's homepage, on the other hand, shows featured trends, popular trends last month, and popular trends last week. So, perhaps now with Tredpedia's offering, we'll start seeing some movement and innovation in this space once again.

Trendpedia homepage

The reasoning is simple enough: While unique visits and page views are useful in measuring how much incoming traffic a site has, it isn't exactly a good or accurate way of measuring impact or even engagement. You could have high incoming traffic (for example, any site that is hugely successful on social sites) but if there is an incredibly high exit rate and only 30 seconds to a minute spent on the site, the traffic numbers don't mean much (i.e. not all traffic is created equal). Furthermore, the rise of new web technologies such as AJAX which don't require page reloads to refresh elements or modules in a page, or video embeds (such as from YouTube) that allow you to watch a video and then browse related videos without ever refreshing the page, are making page views a mostly inaccurate measure and rendering it largely irrelevant.

While most people agree that page views are becoming irrelevant, the same people are uncertain about the future. For example, many agree that attention-based metrics are the future. Attention metrics calculate the total time spent on a site or interacting with a page (or element on a page in the case of Facebook applications) as a percentage of total time that people spend online, to measure a site's relative importance on the web. However, there are many others, like the Tel Aviv-based Nuconomy Studio and even Yahoo's Buzz, that believe using factors like comments on posts, ratings from users, number of times something is shared, and clicks on ads as a measure of how popular something is is a better/more accurate metric.

The problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you're generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks). While it is true that the page view as a metric is on it's way out, this isn't going to happen unless a new metric comes from within the advertising industry, which, with over $20 billion at stake, has the most to gain from a more accurate way of determining where to spend their money.

But it's not that simple either. As Scott Ross explains, different web technologies and applications have unique effects on different sites. What technologies you use and how they effect engagement and interaction on your site may depend on the size of your site, the niche you operate in, and a host of other factors. In fact, the metric that is most applicable could even change from page to page depending on the content on those pages. That being the case, perhaps one metric that is applied to everyone is just not enough and just not practical/efficient. As web technologies evolve, the page view is bound to die as a metric, but unless the advertising industry can get it's act together and work alongside the publishing industry, a good set of new metrics that would be widely adopted is not imminent.