Online Audience Measure Changes

NetRatings has announced the addition of 'Total Minutes' and 'Total Sessions' metrics to its syndicated audience measurement service NetView, in line with changing attitudes to what constitutes a successful web site.

NetView has always reported average time per person and average number of sessions, but the firm says the new metrics 'deliver greater perspective on total engagement across sites'.

Active pages and technologies like AJAX and streaming now mean that viewers can spend a long time on one ever-changing page, making 'page views' a very inaccurate measure of users' 'engagement' with a site. NetRatings says the total minutes metric 'provides a common denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design'. Critics will no doubt argue that viewers can spend a long time on a page looking for something and not finding it, or can leave it chattering away while looking at something else entirely, but on the whole the industry seems ready for a shift towards these newer measures.

'Total Minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development' comments Scott Ross, Director, Product Marketing for the NetView service, 'not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications.'

Data released by the firm shows how the ratio between time spent and page view metrics varies by
web site category. Among search providers, the time spent and page view ratios are similar. For example, the ratio of total minutes spent on Google Search versus Yahoo! Search is 3.3 to 1 (see Table 1). Their page view ratio is similar at 3.1 to 1. Between social networking sites MySpace and YouTube, the time spent ratio is 3.6 to 1, but the ratio between page views is much larger, at 10.4 to 1 because YouTube visitors are mainly watching videos and spend more time per page than MySpace visitors.

Comparisons and top ten site statistics are available at the firm's web site at www.nielsen-netratings.com.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.