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Information Technology News Nielsen/NetRatings set to track visits by time, not pages
Information Technology News Nielsen/NetRatings set to track visits by time, not pages | Nielsen/NetRatings set to track visits by time, not pages |
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| Written by Stephen Withers | |
| Tuesday, 10 July 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Producers of dynamic content (including games) and portal operators have the opposite desire: they want people to spend as much time as possible on each page. The longer they are there, the more opportunities there are to display advertising, whether it is embedded in the content (eg, TV-style crawler ads superimposed on video) or dynamically refreshed along with the real content.If the traditional page impressions model has its failings, it is clear that "total minutes" does too. Ratings services are of particular interest to those who buy and sell advertising on the web. Ranking on visit times assumes that the value of an ad increases the longer it stays on the screen. While there is some relationship - visitors are less likely to register - let alone click on - ads that are only visible for a second, it seems unlikely that they are no more likely to click on the ads after 20 minutes than they were after 2 minutes. Nielsen/NetRatings seems to recognise this problem. "It is worth noting, however, that Total Minutes cannot fully replace the Page View's role as an ad inventory proxy. (Accordingly, we will be maintaining our Page View reporting in both NetView and in WebRF.)," observed Ross. In the longer term, the company will consider the creation of an 'Ad Opportunity' metric that would fairly represent traditional and dynamic web pages. "In the interim, using a combination of time spent and page views for comparing potential ad inventory across sites is recommended," said Ross.
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