I’ve just finished my session at Affiliate Summit on democritized platforms (web2.0 stuff) and affiliate marketing, and got hit by this amazing story from Converseon’s Jeff Doak (via Pownce)…
A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.
Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.
This is emblematic of a sea change that has quietly been happening in the online monetization industry. Like it or not, metrics such as page views are incredibly meaningless and utterly hopeless as gages of valuable traffic or even online campaign success.
Instead, as this article alludes to, total time (ATTENTION) as a metric and standard of judging whether or not something is going to convert is replacing page views and impressions as the way to measure success.
About time.
