Replacing the Page View. New Measures Aren't Quite 'There' Yet
By Dorian Benkoil-Teeming Media
For years, content providers have screamed that the 'this or that' metric used by the major Internet audience rating services
didn't capture the essence of their websites and that advertisers were therefore getting a skewed picture in site rankings.
A lot of the screaming recently has been about the pageview (a raw measure of how many times individual Web pages are
loaded into a computer and seen on a screen) because the newest technologies generate big audiences without generating pageviews.
On July 6 (earlier reports incorrectly said this month) Nielsen//NetRatings will release a new standard that ranks Web properties based on how "active" they are, favoring time spent on the site
and doing away with the pageviews ranking. "Total minutes is the best gauge of user engagement," Scott Ross, senior product manager of Nielsen' s Netview audience measurement product, told Jack Myers Media Business Report in an exclusive interview. "Time spent is a better lowest common denominator, because no matter what site you're on you're spending time."
ComScore Media Metrix, Nielsen's main competitor, is also working to adjust the weighting of pageviews in its scheme, according to reports. Video is just one of the new technologies that garner
engaged audiences but don't generate high numbers of pageviews. Social networking site MySpace has 13 times the number of pageviews of video behemoth YouTube but only three times the number of minutes on site, Ross says. Gaming sites - where people stick around for hours -- are often among the top 10 in time spent per visitor but may not show up in the top 50 in pageviews. A site like Yahoo Maps' beta version uses AJAX, which lets users download
a whole interactive page and zoom in and out and move round without ever generating a second pageview.
Moving graphics in Flash can keep someone involved for minutes on what looks to a pageview counter like a static, unmoving experience but to the human being is very active and appealing and can
contain ads. Even a blog can get tons of highly targeted traffic, with engaged readers gorging on the whole length of posts as they scroll down but each individual post getting very few views as a separate page.
Meanwhile, publishers have for years been milking the pageview system, splitting stories onto multiple pages,
serving "pop ups" or "pop unders" and creating photo slideshows (drunken celebs in bikinis, anyone?) to generate lots of views and game the system. Sleazier operators have created "link farms" that draw traffic and serve ads but don't provide any editorial quality or real audience.
So, Nielsen is absolutely right that the pageview as a metric is plagued with problems. They're looking, Ross says, to create an "ad opportunity" metric that will rank sites based on a more comprehensive view of how people really use the Web today, some mixture of time spent,
number of sessions, interaction with things like AJAX and Flash, and even the lowly pageview. "As practices mature for both the AJAX environment and the video environment, we'll come up with a metric that measures those two, combined with traditional pageviews," Ross says. "But we're not there today. It's going to be a learning process for the industry," he adds.
Is it ever. Yahoo has worked with New York-based "virtual marketing" agency MonacoLange to develop "beacons," small pieces of code that track individual user actions within AJAX or
Flash, and send the info back to Yahoo's Web servers. "In a 30-minute span the receiving server had a load of two billion beacons. This will crash a lot of servers, even at Yahoo," MonacoLange partner Colin Lange told Jack Myers Media Business Report. "We had to go back and scale it back, which limited the amount of data that Yahoo was collecting."
Nielsen's also missing at least part of the boat because so much content is now consumed off site through RSS and other feeds. "Time spent is unreliable, because it assumes people open and close sites
as they browse along the Web," Terry Heaton wrote on his AR&D blog. "This is not necessarily the case anymore, because people can move content to their own browser via RSS."
So, from a specific - albeit game-able and sometimes unhelpful - metric, we're going to a stopgap that's not quite "there" and may be missing the biggest trend in content for the coming years. We're also
moving away from a metric that everyone, including advertisers, understands easily to one that's more vague, less easy to compare to other systems and puts publishers more in the lead.
"At this point the equation is kind of uneven," Ross acknowledges. "The publishers have been the ones developing
these new technologies and working with their user base and trying to attract users to their site and visitors." Then again, nothing risked, nothing gained. And at least Nielsen's trying.
Dorian Benkoil, dorian@jackmyers.com, a regular contributor to Jack Myers Media Business Report, is founder of Teeming Media, a digital media editorial and business consultancy. He blogs at MediaFlect.com.
