Nielsen/NetRatings drops pageviews as ranking metric
Steve Safran April 18th, 2007
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.
9 Comments Add your own
1. David Johnson | April 18th, 2007 at 9:56 am
told ya so. this opens so many doors to grow beyond text-based shovelware and pay for the development of longerform, more engaging content. i\’m clapping right now. terry\’s right, of course (isn\’t he pretty much most of the time?). but i think for the time being, this may be a situation of offering more choices for media buyers and what\’s happening here is putting value into a measurable metric beyond straight up see what-sticks-on-the-wall sponsorships. buyers who are interested in interacting with consumers over a period of time, exposing them to more significant messages with higher potential retention value now have something they can hang their hats on. this is a good thing all around.
2. Jeff Bailey | April 18th, 2007 at 10:36 am
You guys should like this change, at least as it relates to my use of LR. I am “on site” from the moment I open my Opera browser to the moment I leave work, in addition to the polling from RSS. My 9 hours or so of visitation should help out whatever score they give you.
3. invitedmedia | April 18th, 2007 at 10:41 am
now that they’re recognizing the web is no longer text-based and are dropping the premise of pages, the term web”site” is next up for reconsideration.
be innovative.
4. Matt Kennedy | April 18th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Fundamentally, it is difficult for broadcasters to get past the notion of an impression-based sell. It is baked into their on-air model, and it is a fairly easy transition for them to go “ah ha!” and view page views/impressions as currency for monetization on their sites.
The problem here is impression-based business models don’t work in a scalable way. Billions were made by businesses assuming that ad impressions on highly trafficked sites had value…in 1996-2000. This same model collapsed for the simple reason that there was no ROI for the advertisers.
The current site-traffic/impression based models are simply replaying an old movie that ends very badly. In truth, the focus should be on results in the form of conversions. Ultimately, local advertisers will base the success or failure of their online spends on the number of people who walk through the door…not the number of people who may or may not have seen the ad.
We’re already seeing the scalability issues playing out on station sites as banner ad networks begin peanut buttering themselves with the promise of revenue through aggregation (e.g. banner plays on BIM/Mediaspan, etc). While these aggregated networks are easy money for the stations, they do next-to-nothing for the local advertisers, who either can’t afford to buy the inventory, or are simply left out of the mix via national /regional media buyers geo-targeting clumps of sites.
This Nielsen news is interesting. I wonder what people who sat through TVB’s “Selling Station Websites” session must be thinking after hearing a full hour of “impressions are the currency you are selling” mantras.
5. Z | April 18th, 2007 at 11:12 am
We only got visitor reports from Nielsen anyway, and those are off because at-work viewers are skewed way low.
6. Drew Robertson | April 18th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Didn’t I read the other day that cookies are unreliable and that they overstate unique visitors by a factor of 2.5? Yes I did read that.
7. Kate Downey | April 18th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Few points — NNR is not removing page views they just indicated they will not use them for site rankings. From what I have seen their default is unique visitors anyway — based on their panel of course. Page views are not dead yet in their system. Also the time spent metric from NNR will only count “in view” activity not just an open browser. Their tracking is different from a lot of internal systems which are open browser.
8. Steve Safran | April 18th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Kate: You’re right, and that should have been clearer in the story. I have clarified both the headline and the copy thanks to your observation.
9. Michael Gay | April 18th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Well Steve, those who attended the panels at RTNDA heard this from all of us. We talked about this likely change in the New Media 101 panel as well, but when I said it I didn’t think it would happen within 48 hours!
Now everyone will start working on engaging the user better and encourage longer site visits…
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