The Popularity of a Website
Friday, July 13, 2007
This week, Neilson/NetRatings announced that website hits will no longer count towards the popularity of a website. Instead, the amount of time spent on a site, termed “Total Minutes” and “Total Sessions”, will be analyzed to determine rank. Why the switch? Many sites now use technologies like online video and programming languages like Ajax, which require a visitor to spend more time on a site in order for their visit to count. Neilson is of course not the first to recognize time as a factor. Hitwise and comScore have long been measuring it along with page views and others. comScore spokesperson, Andrew Lipsman, explained, We have a host of metrics, and you can theoretically rank on any one of them. It’s just important to examine the space that you’re looking at and maybe determine what the most appropriate metric to use would be. That makes sense, and I am not the only one who seems to agree. Online advertising experts quoted in Louis Hau’s Forbes article voiced their concern about Neilson’s bold move citing that while more than just page views are relevant for Web 2.0, it is not to say that the measurement is all together irrelevant. Hau goes on to address the growth of the online advertising space (up 28% from last year), but reminds us that it is still just 6% of the entire industry. Not surprisingly, our eyes on the Internet are more easily monitored than for any other medium and it might take years to sort through all the available data and figure out what metrics are truly valid. In the midst of all this talk about advertising, PR is inadvertently part of the dialogue. We also need to know the popularity of a site, just as we need to know the circulation of a print publication. A distinct science for this is still clearly in the making. In the meantime, we are advancing in our knowledge of reaching an audience online. In our world, we would argue that page views, for example, still hold a lot of merit as reading a blog or a 500 word article can take no time at all. Labels: advertising, Internet, Marketing, pr, Public Relations, Web 2.0
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
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