Yes. It is big news if you are a publisher or website owner. Pageviews as a metric are dying. Sites are now into video streams, interactions, social media which translates into time spent on a website so the big measurement companies like Nielsen have announced that they are no longer ranking sites by pageview and instead are ranking based on time spent. According to the same article, here's what changes when you move to time spent instead of pageviews:
- Google drops because of its model of giving you results fast
- AOL jumps to first because of instant messaging
- Yahoo of course remains strong and this change helps them because of the use of Ajax on their websites including the homepage
From a marketing POV, I'm not sure how much this helps you. If you were just ranking publishers to include in your media buy based on pageviews you were doing a poor job anyway. Personally, I've been using time spent on a website and their user profiles for years so for me this doesn't change much. Plus, you need to know how a site converts or generates whatever actions you need so knowing pageviews never really helped anyway. Time spent, activity, content, user profile, audience duplications, and uniques were always more important measures anyway.
For now, the industry moves in the right direction - away from measuring eyeballs and into time spent. Personally, I'd rather see some combination of user interaction with time spent so sites that people use as wallpaper can be separated from sites that people truly interact with.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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