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New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google
StonyandCher write(s) with news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. 'Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
Moments ago, Google purchased Nielsen/NetRatings for approximately $135 million in cash. The new metric ranking was immediately disabled for further work.
"New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube." - very insightful. YouTube better watchout! With this kind of headlines they're likely to get bought. Oh wait.
you can't measure that...
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Now all those people who choose their search engine by its Nielsen/NetRatings ratings are going to stop using Google.....why that might be a few dozen people at least!
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
In my experience, most people don't bother to close their browser when they are done browsing. It's even worse for people used to tabbed browsing. How many times do you shut down the computer at night with tabs containing something you looked at with your morning coffee? I know I do as often as not.
The cake is a pie
Google is its own Web metric
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Sometimes i visit a site that links a lot of places (an common one is a google search) and open every site in a different browser tab, and then i read. Now, the last tabs are likely to be there for long time, either till i close it, read it, or even click on links there. How that kind of behaviour gives more weight to the sites i opened at the end?
And to make it worse, most browsers now support tabs.
Not spending a lot of time on a search engine is a GOOD thing. It means the engine is doing what it is supposed to...direct you quickly to what you are looking for.
Now THAT's what I call American resistance to the metric system.
--parasonic
Anyway, they shouldn't just abandon page hits for time spent. Lots of quick impressions should be just as valuable as a few long impressions, maybe even more so(1) depending on the type of ads being sold (static splash vs. animated flash).
(1) Spell-check says "moreso" isn't a word? I'm sure I've seen it before.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Sure, sessions will work for sites like forums. However, is there going to be anything shown by session length that won't be shown by page views in that case? What about pages that you can really spend days to weeks at a time staring at, such as the glibc manual or the Coyotos microkernel specification? If the user never refreshes the page before the end of the session, information-packed sites aren't going to be measured at all.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
What matters is not page views or page durations but redirects to pay-sites. That's the value of any site from an advertisers point of view. When I read the NY times I spend a long time there but I'm not likely to be shopping and even if I was in a mood to shop the probability they happen to show me an ad for something I'm interested in is close to nil. Plus the adds they tend to show there are delux flash moving ads or big long columns.
Now when I go to google and type in "blow up dolls" or Airline miles or 629 investments or some purchase worthy topic, I read the ads. Not only that but the ads are short. so I don't spend much time. But I click through a dozen of them into tabs in a few seconds.
When I watch you tube, how long to I look at the ads? probably not at all--I scroll then off screen. But I do see the adds on the leader of the video. But that's only a few second on a 5 minute video. A good and focused 5 seconds yes. Even subject worthy 5 seconds. But not 5 minutes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Right, so the users behind my NAT are going to be measured as one person spending all day on somepopularsite.com, in 8 different places simultaneously? What about the four other open tabs currently open in my browser? Am I still visiting those sites? The answer could be 'yes', but I don't see how that adds value for advertisers.
HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means that it's inherently difficult (i.e. impossible) to consistently get accurate data about the duration of a given visit. It can be argued that you can derive data that's statistically significant. You can argue further that if everyone uses the same metric then they'll be valid for comparison purposes, which is enough for the MBAs in Marketing, I suppose.
I personally think time spent on a website is a silly metric, and will continue to hold that opinion until someone can make the case that staring at an advertisement for longer period of time actually encourages a person to finally click on it, rather than tune it out completely. (This works well for branding, but for little else.)
There's a lot of nuance that can be brought into this discussion, and this is where the good advertisers and marketers earn their keep. Assuming that either page views or time spent on a site are sufficient to make a solid judgement of the value of a given website is, uh, a little short on nuance.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
More likely Google doesn't give a shit whether or not some Web 2.0 metric gives it a pat on the shoulder or not. Google:
1. Makes its money out of serving ads, not out of being the site where you spend an hour on the same page. If you came, searched and looked at their ads, that's it.
2. Google's secret sauce is the brand name and search algorithm, not its Nielsen rating. People go to Google because they have something to search, and gets new users by word of mouth and by the deals it has with the likes of Mozilla to make their site the default home page. It's not like users start with Nielsen's Top X page and find out about Google there.
In other words, it seems... surrealistic to read the title and summary that Nielsen's ratings will hurt Google. Google doesn't get any income or users out of what rating it has, so the amount of "hurt" will be anywhere between insignificant and none whatsoever.
3. It seems to me like a flawed rating anyway, _especially_ coming from a usability expert. Google's search is a tool. Being able to just do what you needed done, quickly and with a minimum of useless fluff, is what a lot of us would call a good tool.
And the need for such tools won't go away just because some other sites work in a different way. Just because Ebay existed (as an example of a site where users spend a lot of time in a row), didn't make Google obsolete before, so why would it now?
4. Why the heck does it even matter, other than techno-fetishism, in Google's case, whether it's page refreshes or some AJAX kind of thing that fetches the results in the same page? No, seriously. Each search produces a different list, so essentially it _is_ a different "document". The browser is already perfectly able to display a new document. Why would anyone sane want to try to, basically, reinvent the page refresh in Javascript instead of using the browser's existing mechanism? No, seriously.
AJAX and the like make sense when you can actually have most of the data and the processing client-side, and you can actually offer some purely client-side functionality. In Google's case that's not even possible. You can't transfer the whole search database to the browser as XML and let the user tinker with the search expression locally, in the same document. So it's going to involve a round trip to the server and displaying a new result list anyway. So why not just let the browser display the new page?
Nielsen is generally a smart guy, but maybe there is no One True Metric to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. For some things it is a usability advantage to do more client side and not refresh the page, while for other things it makes no sense whatsoever. The focus should be on how well and intuitively is the user served by the site, not on promoting one arbitrary metric like time spent, taken out of context, for everything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Exactly. Maybe the fact that a perfectly usable and popular tool scores badly on their new metrics, _and_ there's no imaginable gain whatsoever if it changed itself needlessly to fit the new metric, should only tell them that their new metric needs some more work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.