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Nielsen NetRatings Adds Total Minutes & Total Sessions

Search-Engines-Web.com [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, July 10, 2007
16 years ago2,641 views

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_070710.pdf

AOL Media Network Has Most Engaged Users in May 2007
NEW YORK – July 10, 2007 – Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market
research, announced today that it added both “Total Minutes” and “Total Sessions” metrics to NetView, its
syndicated Internet audience measurement service. While NetView has always reported average time per
person and average number of sessions, the new metrics deliver greater perspective on total
engagement across sites.
Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies like AJAX and streaming (both audio/video and other content
like sports scoreboards and live stock quotes) have greatly enhanced the consumer experience, yet pose
special challenges to Internet audience measurement. AJAX refreshes content without reloading entire
Web pages and streaming provides dynamically changing content within a single page or a media player.
While a page view metric under-credits such engagement, the total minutes metric provides a common
denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design.
“’Total Minutes’ is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only
because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web
environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet
applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product marketing for the NetView service.
Nielsen//NetRatings data show that the difference between time spent and page view metrics varies by
Web site category. Among search providers, the time spent and page view ratios are similar. For example,
the ratio of total minutes spent on Google Search versus Yahoo! Search is 3.3 to 1 (see Table 1). Their
page view ratio is 3.1 to 1.
Between social networking sites MySpace and YouTube, the time spent ratio is 3.6 to 1, but the ratio of
page views is much larger, at 10.4 to 1. YouTube visitors spend more time per page than MySpace
because they are primarily watching videos, requiring fewer page refreshes. While MySpace may be able
to serve more ads because of its number of page refreshes, the time spent ratio is an important
comparison of audience engagement on the two sites.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Google now 5th, AOL first? Ridiculous.

IMHO, I think it's not because people read a long time your pages that they will more click on your ads...

Eytan Buchman [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I still think that page views is more important. When you land on a page, you scan its contents and lock on to whatever interests you. A longer article or a shorter article shouldn't make much of a difference, as you see the same ad and probably process it for the same length of time.

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