Page view - R.I.P. (almost)

[piccolomondo]

Things are beginning to change in the web stats industry. Steve Rubel already predicted last year, the page view is not dead, yet, but it's officially irrelevant.

Nielsen/NetRatings has decided to drop page views as a measure of site traffic and site popularity - they will now report the average time spent by a visitor and average number of sessions per visitor for each site. Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them.

The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax "increasingly make page views less meaningful", AP reports.

Currently page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site, are an important metrics for attracting advertisers to a websites. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site's ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

[piccolomondo]

Is it good or bad?

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives 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. This maybe bad news for Google Search as their main task is to "send visitors away" but should further boost the rankings of YouTube and other video websites.

According to AP:

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

[piccolomondo]

How does this affect blogs?

Blogs are a good case where 'time spent' is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the 'quantity over quality' problem. It's easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views.

But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views?

In other words, check the 'time spent on site' figures for those blogs and I think you'd find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn't.

So in the case of blogs, I'd argue that 'time spent on site' is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

[piccolomondo]

What Nielsen's Competitors Are Doing

Nielsen's rival, comScore Media Metrix, "addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour." But that doesn't take into account the effectiveness of a site, because again people could be visiting a site due to it being highly ranked in Google - yet when they click through they find rubbish content and so very quickly leave.


ComScore needs to follow next. Further, both companies need to open up their auditing process across The Long Tail.


Compete (a R/WW sponsor) has a good measure called 'engagement', which measures things like Daily Attention and Average Stay.
Alexa measures 'Page Views per user'.


So things are beginning to change in the web stats industry. But it's not yet a totally satisfying change, because with the likes of Google you want to somehow measure relevancy and with blogs you want to measure engagement. But it's at least a step away from page views, which have become too easily exploited - not just by some blogs, but also by the likes of Facebook and MySpace (which both make the user go through extra clicks to get to what they want).