Newspaper Web Sites Have Added Reason To Get Deeply Into Video As Nielsen Net/Ratings Says It Will Now Rank A Site’s Popularity By Time Spent There Rather Than Page Views

Philip M. Stone July 13, 2007

Those tricks used to increase page views like spreading stories over three or four pages to increase the number of pages accessed will soon become a thing of the past as Nielsen Net/Ratings switches the basis for its web ranking system to the time a visitor spends on a site rather than the number of pages accessed. And that should be a big boost for sites to greatly expand their video use, for how better a way to keep eyeballs on a site for prolonged periods of time than several one or two minute videos.

Equipment every media website will need from now on

And that change would bring a few switches to the rankings of the most popular US newspaper web sites. NYTimes.com would still remain number one with 12.535 million visitors spending an average 27:34 minutes on the site giving it more than twice the time than any other newspaper web site. But when the rankings are based on the number of visitors multiplied by the average time they spend on the site  then USAToday, currently second, change places with washingtonpost.com, currently third.

The Los Angeles Times site, currently fourth in the rankings based on visitors alone would drop to ninth based on the average time each visitor spent on the site; Boston.com, currently fifth in page views moves up to fourth when time is taken into account and The Wall Street Journal site, currently sixth based on visitors, moves up a notch to fifth when the time ranking is used.

So now editors need to change direction and organize their site around keeping visitors there for as long as possible. It won’t matter if they have call up four pages to read a long story – that can now be sprawled on just one page – but now editors will want to ensure they have the one or two minute video to go along with that story so that by getting the complete multimedia story people linger on the site.

It’s all just one more refinement as the infant Internet tries to plant itself as a major advertising vehicle. At the moment it’s all about survival of the fittest -- those sites that get the most visitors garner the lion’s share of the advertising dollars. Right now the web only gets about 6% of all advertising dollars so its potential for growth is enormous but while there are so many different measurement systems available the debate has never really stopped on how best to judge performance.

Some 10 years ago all we cared about were “hits” – a single request to the server for some information. But call up a web page with lots of pictures and that one page generates a lot of hits. Advertisers didn’t think that was a cool way of judging the popularity of a site as editors then made sure there were plenty of pictures and other items to get a page’s hits up.

So then came the page view. Go to a site and click a page and it’s a page view, click an article listed on that page and it’s another page view. Since clever editors figured out that a 750 word article could easily be split in three or four pages and you want to read the entire article, then that’s another three or four page views. (Regular FTM readers will have noted we never resorted to such skullduggery and we let all of our 1,000 word articles run on one page – silly us, we probably could have tripled our page views over the years if we had been smart!)

But now if FTM is to be judged on how much time you spend reading our site and you continue to read our 1,000 word articles in full then we’re going to do okay now when ranked by the average time you spend on our site.

So the big change now is not how much interactivity you have on our site – how many pages you call up etc. -- but rather how much time you spend on our site calling up and reading our material.

Naturally the big question is what is the better system – page views or time? According to Scott Ross, director of marketing for NetView, “Total Minutes – the name Nielsen Net/Ratings gives to its new system -- is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA (Rich Internet Applications that allows pages to update without the user calling up another page) and streaming media, but also of web environments that have never been well served by page views, such as online gaming and Internet applications.”

Indeed one thought making the rounds is that perhaps one ranking system does not fit all and those that are static and those that are interactive should be judged differently.

And how will advertisers react? Debra Aho Williamson, an eMarketer senior analyst, doesn’t really believe advertisers will change much where they put their advertising money, but rather the style of web sites will change with much less jumping from one page to another to find what one wants.

Scott Ross, Nielsen Net/Ratings director of product marketing, said a major reason for the change is the automatic updating of pages that don’t require the user to call up a new page and the fact that audio and video are now mainstream.

As an example he said a website that automatically updates sports scores for hours would only show under the old system as one page view, but if a user was fixed on that page for hours watching updated scores coming in then that user is far more valuable to an advertiser than under the page view system.

At the end of the day, what is it all about? Ross summed it up best, “We’re maturing with the industry.”

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