Nielsen adopts time spent as the dominant web metric

Although the current most popular web metric is still page views, total time spent by all users will allow Nielsen to more accurately gauge site popularity. 

Page views measure the number Web pages a user loads from a site, but many companies, such as Yahoo, are turning towards software like Ajax, which updates site data constantly without reloading the page.  Streaming online video, which almost all websites are now embracing, also cause page view numbers to decline.

Media companies such as newspapers that are trying to increase their online presence, particularly by including online video, could benefit from this new web metric standard, which is harder to distort than page views.  For example, AOL ranks only sixth in terms of total page views but jumps to first place with 25 billion total minutes.  Similarly, Google drops from third in page views to fifth in total time spent.

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total time spent is the best gauge for site traffic,” announced Scott Ross, Nielsen’s director of product marketing. Nielsen will continue to examine page view figures as a gauge of a site’s inventory, but it will no longer use this data to formally rank Web pages.  Time spent, explains Ross, is a better measure of user engagement with a website.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo!, and Paid Content