Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism reports Nielsen’s decision to drop pageviews as the primary metric for site measurement. Good riddance say I.
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.
I posted on this a while back, arguing that Ajax and other page-cache models were making the Web 1.0 model of page-by-page sessions irrelevant. Expect to see some sites rail against this decision, and don’t expect the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to make a move anytime soon. Here’s the pdf of the Nielsen-Netratings release.
DOncha wonder what the effect of this on Goog’s stock might be?
Jim