New Website Measurement System Just A Little Less Useless Than Previous One

from the keeping-score dept

Tue, Jul 10th 2007 8:45am — Joseph Weisenthal

In a bid to improve the relevance of its ratings, Nielsen/NetRatings has announced that it will no longer use page views as its primary metric for measuring the popularity of websites. Instead, it will focus on the amount of time that users spend on the site. Obviously, there have been a lot of problems with the current system, as the use of page views grossly inflates the popularity of some sites, like MySpace, while penalizing sites that aren't refreshed or reloaded as often. As the above article notes, the new system will give YouTube a boost, but will ding Google's main site, which isn't designed to keep users around. Of course, therein lies the flaw with this new measurement system. Google is incredibly profitable and successful, precisely because it does a good job of whisking users away to other sites, either through ads or its search results. The idea of penalizing it because users don't spend a lot of time on the site is absurd. When it comes to TV shows, it may make sense to adopt a uniform measurement system, because all TV shows have the same purpose: to sell ads. Websites, however, have a variety of different business models, so trying to define a standard metric of success is going to prove impossible. Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a site or service is its profitability, which, unlike page views or time spent, isn't so easily gamed.

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Filed Under: measurement, problems
Companies: myspace, nielsen

17 Comments

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Nasty Old Geezer, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:11am

Why either-or?
If I am evaluating a site (or anything else) a single metric will rarely if ever give me a realistic picture of success.

Humans have excess enthusaism for "the best" without saying "for what purpose".
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Ryan, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:30am

what about visitors?
Why not just use visitors? Whenever I've tried to buy or sell a website, people only want to know two things:

Monthly unique visitors
and
Monthly Net Profit.
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Joel Coehoorn, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:30am

Neilson ratings are used by advertisers to determine what rates they will pay to what sites. If your site isn't interested in selling ads, or if you use a business model that cuts Nielson out by selling limited text-only ads like Google, than it doesn't really matter how Nielson rates you.

Advertisers seem to be hung up on the idea that internet ads need to turn into an instant sale. Certainly the internet makes that possible in many circumstances, but I think this is a bad idea. An internet ad needs to be viewed more like a billboard placed next to a freeway, where the goal is often to build brand recognition or just plant a seed for a later sale. Anything more aggressive and you just annoy people. If someone clicks an ad then great- maybe pay bonuses for 'clicks' and 'actions', but a single view like a motorist driving past a billboard on the interstate should be the baseline.
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ChurchHatesTucker, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:35am

Absurd?
"Google is incredibly profitable and successful, precisely because it does a good job of whisking users away to other sites, either through ads or its search results. The idea of penalizing it because users don't spend a lot of time on the site is absurd."

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. If a user breezes through a page, an ad is less likely to catch someones attention.

Google *is* a bit different, though, in that the ad may be exactly what the person was looking for, but if it's not they may not even notice it. A better metric would be click-through rates, or click-through-and-buy rates, of course.
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Tony, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:56am

Not so absurd
Well if they are going o base the ratings on time, I think it could just work.

For example x amout of users spend x amout of time at google versus yahoo...

or x amout of users spend x amout of time at myspace versus facebook.

It obviosly makes no sense to compare search engine to social network as it is said in the article. However with time you can get a really accurate system for rating groups of websites instead of every website.
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Tony, 10 Jul 2007 @ 9:58am

damn
i misspelled 'to' by the way :(
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CodeMaster2, 10 Jul 2007 @ 10:20am

Here's an absolutely crazy idea for measuring websites:
Unique Visitors.

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Buzz, 10 Jul 2007 @ 10:37am

LOL
They should rank sites based on who has the smallest HTML file sizes. ^_^
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Matt Bennett, 10 Jul 2007 @ 10:44am

Joe, you speak as if the "measuring the worth" of a site via Nielsen ratings is somewhat important. It's not. Nielsen ratings are a tool for advertisers to judge how ell their money is spent on none-click through ads, nothing else. Citizens bank homepage does not care, it is there to serve bank customers, not place ads. Google does not care, they have a bidding system, and their users can directly measure effectiveness through the quality of leads they get thru click-thrus, the only thing they pay for.
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Mr. Vage, 10 Jul 2007 @ 10:53am

Re: LOL
Then we'd see more of those crappy all Flash sites. All that's in the HTML is an embed tag.
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OKVol, 10 Jul 2007 @ 11:47am

I call BS on this one too
Page views - too easily spoofed.
Time viewing site? - HTML is connectionless, Google downloads quickly being lean and looks bad. And, if you are still using dial-up, you spend forever waiting on YouTube. How is Neilson going to see that I may be waiting on a page to load in one tab, downloading a second, and looking at a third?

Neilson is getting to be more and more irrelevant. They seem to be spending most of their time proving that they are relavent.
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OKVol, 10 Jul 2007 @ 11:49am

And furthermore
Unique visitors? You better use cookies and hope folks aren't security paranoid. We have 200+ users behind one IP address here.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jul 2007 @ 12:56pm

I measure business success by bottom-line, net profit.

Anything else is like measuring your cock by starting at your knee. The numbers sound great, but it ain't gonna rock anyone's world.
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OKVol, 10 Jul 2007 @ 12:59pm

And still more
We use a proxy here that caches the web sites, and updates the cache automatically for many sites that are frequently hit. So, 10 people could look like one, or the cache could be updating when no one is hitting the site.

And, so many sites are coding themselves with specific cookies for tracking that my hit rates on the cache are going down.
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JOHN DOE, 10 Jul 2007 @ 5:20pm

WHY NOT OFFER BOTH ...
Serious, why would I use a company that only offers one why smaller better companies like hitwise offer more.....
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Ambrose, 11 Jul 2007 @ 12:53am

Two points
If they're going to measure sites by time spent there, they need two completely opposing scales: for search engine websites, LESS time means you're better. For most other sites it's the other way around.

And you know what? There is still such a thing as public service broadcasting! Maybe not so much in the USA but it makes me sad to see anyone say "all TV shows have the same purpose: to sell ads". They do have ratings for the BBC in the UK, strangely, despite there being no ads at all on the BBC...
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selby, 20 Dec 2008 @ 10:20pm

selling your website
stop wasting your money on expensive listing fees and final value fees sell your sites and domains at www.zoomwam.com today for free
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