You’ve heard it here at LR for a long time: pageviews are a lousy metric. Web readership is distributed via RSS, and with the way pages are designed and updated now with AJAX and other technologies, websites are no longer about the pageviews. We mentioned this as recently as yesterday at the LR panel at RTNDA@NAB. In the Wall Street Journal today (paid sub. req.) we learn that Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping pageviews as a metric for ranking sites and will go with time spent on a site instead. Still, this isn’t the right metric, as my partner Terry Heaton points out in the AR&D newsletter:
Nielsen’s assertion that time spent is a better metric is also going to be a problem, and I think what we’ll eventually wind up with will some sort of regular visitor count, and that advertisers will buy visitors in the same way they now buy ratings. Time spent is unreliable, because it assumes people open and close sites as they browse along the web. This is not necessarily the case anymore, because people can move content to their own browser via RSS. Also, not everybody closes out a session when they’re done, and that means it will appear people are “on site” when actually they’re not.
Just when we think we understand the dynamics of the web, everything changes. The metrics of sales have changed, and that’s a difficult concept to wrap your head around. It’s even more difficult for advertisers to understand because we’ve trained them in “the large number.” We need to understand the specific visitors to our niche sites to maximize our revenue instead.