Once the golden standard of a Web site’s popularity, the number of individual pages loaded by surfers is no longer a relevant gauge of their interest, according to the company that specializes in measuring Web traffic. Nielsen is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will abandon the old standby measurement of page views in favor of time spent viewing a Web page.
New Web technologies such as Ajax, and the popularity of streaming video, have prompted the change. Sites like Yahoo use Ajax to reload only a portion of a Web page with new content, which does not generate a page view despite users continuing to interact with the site. Similarly, watching a streaming video from YouTube for an extended period generates only one page view despite persisting attention to the page. By measuring the time users spend on each Web site instead of how many pages they load, Nielsen hopes to find a more accurate yardstick for Web advertisers to use in deciding where their ad dollars go.
The move has generated some controversy because of the way it will rerank competitors. Google will move from third most popular site, based on page views, to fifth, based on time. On the other end of the spectrum, AOL will move from sixth to first, with 25 billion minutes spent there in May alone.
