New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google 226
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?"'"
Google announces acquisition of Nielsen/NetRatings (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google announces acquisition of Nielsen/NetRati (Score:5, Funny)
--parasonic
The new Google NetRatings is in beta now! (Score:3, Funny)
More likely Google doesn't give a shit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Why?
Because on a typical website, half of the page content is exactly the same on every single page: logo, header, footer, navigation rail, etc. The content well is the only part that's different from page to page.
Why should the client and server request and return those page elements over and over again if they never change? AJAX allows only those eleme
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Yeah, then it would be MapQuest... (Or what MapQuest used to be, anyway.) We don't have to imagine, we've all used it before.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
But will it score badly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doubleclick (Score:3, Funny)
Love the headline (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously retarded method (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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When I watch you tube, how long to I look at the ads?
There are adds on YouTube? I've never noticed. Of course now I think about it, there must be, but I've honestly never registered their presence, which kinda goes to prove your point.
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Re:Love the headline (Score:5, Insightful)
The article submission takes the angle that this is a kick in the nuts for Google! As if Google depends on Nielsen's reporting high metrics to advertisers so that they can charge more for banner ads! So Nielsen would report a low metric for Google! Oooh, what intrigue! Nielsen has their balls in a sling now! How will Google retaliate?
But that wasn't the point the guy was making at all; for him Google was just a good example of an extreme example. I would guess that nobody in either company is really concerned about Nielsen's calculated metric for Google. Google acts as its own Nielsen and competes with Nielsen using a not-quite-equivalent business model. It's a sort of integrated content provider/ratings company all on its own. They don't need to have their metrics reported to advertisers. Advertisers are showing up with money already for that AdSense program, and the cost is associated with a metric calculated for a search term, not Google as a content provider itself. The advertiser has already chosen Google (as the content provider) so implicitly of course they also have to agree to the terms of Google's ratings service since it's part of the package. Nielsen's rating of the Google home page doesn't enter into it! Just ask anyone using AdSense if they gave a crap about Google's Nielsen rating.
But (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:But - well, what about sessions? (Score:2)
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Re:But - well, what about sessions? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It should be "more so." Not that spell-check is ever to be trusted.
http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/moreso.html [wsu.edu]
Re:But - well, what about sessions? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:5, Funny)
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New money-making Firefox feature (Score:2)
What actually happened is that sites started splitting up content over 10 or 20 pages, alla ad-view-generating tech sites today. Prepare for unending mazes of content to make you stay much longer on one web site.
This sounds like a new needed firefox plug in. Content-re-aggregator. Detects multiple page articles and re-assembles them into one page or at least pre-loads them all. It does not actually have to detect anything. in manual mode you tell it when to re-aggregate, in ultra-dumb mode maybe you even show it where the "next" button is. Then wham. Re-aggregates the content, strips out the ads and replaces them with google-ads. Cha Ching.
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Of course you can (Score:2)
Re:Of course you can (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My God! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My God! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that's good fer a god-honest knee-slappin' guffaw!
Thanks - I needed that.
Just so I don't get karma-slapped upside the OT head ... I've always thought of Nielson as a mechanism for pricing ads; like all representations of average behaviour, it doesn't say shinola about a particular individual's viewing habits. So, as long as the advertisers think they're getting value out of the metric, that's fine. But I've never talked to anyone who used a Nielson rating as a TV viewing guide.
Similarly, I've never talked to anyone who uses Nielson/NetRatings as a measure of the usefulness of quality/level of interest/etc. of a web site. And NetRatings doesn't even have the mindshare of Nielson the TV dudes. Anyway - in the context of a mechanism for ad pricing, google is the web equivalent of a TV ad about TV ads, which doesn't make any sense for a NetRatings rating. For that matter, what's the NetRatings measure of http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ [nielsen-netratings.com] ?
Methinks that this announcement of a change in metric is just an attempt to get some profile on NetRatings' existence, and the notion of affecting google.com's measure for ads is plain absurd, because google *is* the advertiser. Drawing an equivalency between an indexing and search discovery mechanism like google and a less meta-focused content site is just boneheaded.
A bit of a lame submission IMHO.
It's all about advertising (Score:2)
Seriously though, it might effect how many people choose to advertise through Google. Advertisers go for websites that they think are popular.
Personally I'd like to know if Nielsen/Netratings plans to measure the time people spend actually looking at a site, rather than having it open in a background window, or leaving it open while they do something else.
Idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Idiotic (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be true, but what about when I open a link in a new tab from something I am reading but don't get to it for another 20 minutes. After I get to it I notice that the link is crap and close it right away. Total time spent = 4 seconds. Total time they think spent is 20 minutes 4 seconds.
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That might be true, but what about when I open a link in a new tab from something I am reading but don't get to it for another 20 minutes. After I get to it I notice that the link is crap and close it right away. Total time spent = 4 seconds. Total time they think spent is 20 minutes 4 seconds.
There will always be examples like that. However, unless such behavior becomes even remotely normal then statistically speaking I don't think it would make a dent in usage patterns. Certainly not if you consider median usage rather than average.
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Assuming you don't have some kind of page refresh every n seconds
Two notes on that:
1) iGoogle, Gmail, and other AJAX websites do a sort of self-update every so often. I wonder how those would factor into the ratings for people who always keep those open in a tab (I, for example, pretty much always have iGoogle open in a tab).
2) I'm a regular user of Opera, which, in its latest iteration, includes a feature called "Speed Dial [opera.com]." This feature consists of a tab that has previews of nine user-selected web pages. The user can define how often the page preview updates--I ha
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2) I'm a regular user of Opera...The user can define how often the page preview updates--I have mine set to every 30 minutes.
I love Opera too. If you right-click on any page there is a "Reload Every..." submenu on the context menu. I have 8 tabs in the background, updating at different rates depending on their content (active eBay bids every 20 minutes until close to the end, then every 5 seconds. News every 10 minutes. TV listings every 30 minutes (what a surprise), etc.)
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As far as I can tell, there is no way to set a page, for example Slashdot, to always reload every n minutes. If I have sufficiently searched every corner, it seems that I would have to check the "enable" setting every time I open Slashdot for it to automati
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So this is half of what I want. Now if only I can figure out a way to have it always automatically reload Slashdot even if I close the saved session's Slashdot tab and open a new Slashdot tab.
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For me, the automatic reloading seems tied to the URL. That is http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] always reloads at the same rate, but http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?yada.yada [slashdot.org] does not inherit that option.
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>web pages. It seems like a difficult thing to measure, particularly in this day
>of tabs and self-refreshing web pages, etc.
Actually, it seems quite easy... Just pull some arbitrary metric out of your ass and slap the name "Nielson Ratings" on it. Hey, its "Nielson Ratings" so it must be accurate.
I think the best metric might be 'multiple metrics'. Provide categories such as page views, unique page views, time on p
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And it doesn't appear to be a memory issue. I free up more memory by killing gnome-panel.
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So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I mean really, it's not like anyone needs Nielsen to tell them that putting your ad on Google is going to generate fairly well targeted views. Personally, IF I were to advertise something, I'd rather it be unobtrusive (not annoying) and well-targeted: something Google does quite well.
Tabbed browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
And to make it worse, most browsers now support tabs.
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Flash can also tell if you're sitting in front of your webcam and hear what you're talking about if you let it.
Embedded Google? (Score:2)
Time on page (Score:2)
--
Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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For other types of Web sites, on the other hand, this sounds like a good thing. Judging a content site by page hits is just stupid. And yet that's the metric that everybody's using. What it means is that you have all the so-called news sites scrambling to stuff their pages with crap. They push the story about the world's ugliest dog more than the latest story about corruption in the Bush administration, be
Why would google care? (Score:2)
The onl
This doesn't make sense (Score:2)
Opening a can of carnivorous worms (Score:2)
This is going to bite the rating company big-time. First thing, a fair percentage of the userbase does things that severely interfere with time-on-site measurements. Blocking cookies is an obvious one. Another is blocking of various Javascript functions like onunload that prevent the page from seeing the user leaving the site. Unless the site eliminates direct off-site links and always redirects through it's own page, which users tend not to like either. And even after resolving all those issues, what const
Data (Score:2)
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I imagine they are about as accurate at rating websites as they are at rating TV shows: so-so at mainstream and really lousy at anything niche.
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stats which one can opt-out of or avoid altogether are only slightly more accurate than the RNC surveying only republicans to see if the "general public" likes the prez or not; or checking only microsoft's server logs to come up with browser market shares...
total time spent on a
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Of course Alexa is even worse, since they track a self-selecting audience. I don't have Alexa installed on this machine, but everybody at work does, so our site thus looks on Alexa like 50% of Alexa users that visit our site spend 8 hours a day on our site. And we can then gue
Will Help Google (Score:2)
re: Uninformed posts about leaving tabs open.. (Score:4, Informative)
They already do it, and will be doing it. Google Analytics delivers it. It's quite informative.
1 million times 1 second is alot of seconds... (Score:3, Informative)
But for the very reason that I dont need to spend much time there and more often than not its 2 clicks to my result, one click on "search" and the next click on one of the first page search returns; I go there regularly as a starting point, resulting in a massive number of short visits.
If the measure is TOTAL time, google would still be number 1 followed closely by slashdot for me... Because 47 bazillion* one second page views per day is still 47 bazillion seconds of eyeball per day!
*the author realises that, as a complete idiot, he is prone to stupid exaggeration
err!
jak.
"Hurt Google" ? (Score:2)
If the ratings didn't change with a new metric, it wouldn't really be a new metric, would it? Why does Slashdot need to spin this just for the negative side?
Personally, I think this is a good change. Page views are a terrible metric, and encourage sites to make bad design choices, like breaking articles into twenty parts to mak
Neilsen? (Score:2)
Google in great peril! (Score:4, Funny)
only one "metric" matters (Score:3, Insightful)
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There's no way to track that (hopefully), and yet a lot of business comes about exactly that way.
This is why real advertisers sell space and don't bother with tracking. If the ad isn't getting you business, you wouldn't have renewed your contract with the advertiser.
No good can come of this (a new slower web) (Score:4, Insightful)
PHB: "How can we get people to stay longer?"
Eager-Beaver Designer: "Let's put everything in Flash, put fewer words per screen and longer pauses between new screens."
PHB: "Great!"
My point is that I am a browser and I use a web browser. That means I want to browse. That means I want to be able to glance at something, make a quick decision, and control the movement to the next chunk of content.
This emphasis on viewing time will cause designers (and their bosses) to try anything they can think of to slow down the user.
Re:No good can come of this (a new slower web) (Score:4, Funny)
PHB: "How can we get people to stay longer?"
Eager-Beaver Designer: "Let's put everything in Flash, put fewer words per screen and longer pauses between new screens."
PHB: "Great!"
~~end quote~~
Hmm, I think they've already done this
In other news, Amazon has decided to allow worldwide royalty-free use of one click, whilst simultaneously patenting their new 'one hundred click slo-purchase' system.
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What it will also do, hopefully, is give less credence to those damned websites that function only to direct traffic somewhere. You know, the search-engine equivalent of spam.
Advertisers will be less likely to give someone money if the average page view is only 1 second. That, in turn, will lead to better content to keep our interest.
One hopes.
Gmail? (Score:2)
Any one-dimensional ranking is biased. Bias notwithstanding, Google is a *big player*. What meaning has a ranking beyond that?
I told you metric was bad (Score:2)
All well and good. (Score:4, Insightful)
How does the "Web 2.0" metaphor work with Porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?"'"
If 1.0 is surfing one handed while jerking off, Web 2.0 is having a USB pocket pussy connected to an interactive AJAX interface.
In all seriousness, can we dispense with the fucking Web 2.0 crap? It is today's "information superhighway". If you use the phrase without a hint of sarcasm, you are an idiot.
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Thank you in advance.
Hurt Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly there are a few closet Google employees around here... So tell me, are the higher-ups even remotely concerned with a traffic ranking? I mean, if suddenly MSN Search spikes up over Google in the ratings because its so goddamned user-hating that it takes 3 minutes to search a single topic...is anyone going to blow a gasket, provided traffic and revenue remain at present expected levels?
I sincerely doubt it.
I'm sorry... (Score:3, Insightful)
This can only 'help' pages that take forever to load...
Just smile and nod (Score:2)
Shhhh... don't let on that you have seen through the charade! The sheep who run your competition will create crappy sites that force visitors to stay on them for a long time in order to get worthwhile content. Users will leave these sites, flocking to sites created by people who, like you, realize that ultimately it's about delivering a site people want to actually use.
The Nielsen metrics debate is really about advertising, which contrary to popular belief, does not apply to all sites. Even those sites th
There's no Googl here, keep moving (Score:2)
Don't you guys see what's going on here. A creative way to throw "Google" in the mix, to get your press release a better publicity.
Englighten me, how is Google affected by NetRatings ranking anyway
Wrong. (Score:2)
See, google isn't just a search engine anymore folks. It is not going to hurt them.
This will help YouTube.com though (Score:2)
No matter how you count popularity, Google will do alright.
Get The Word Out! (Score:2)
Has anyone explained this to the marketoids? As far as I can tell "Web 2.0" is a marketing term that means "We're new and improved and you should look at us so you can see the ads we present and make us money." I've found no consistent explanation from any of the supposed Web 2.0 purveyors as to exactly what they mean by it. If the ratings folks have a valid and generalizable def
Unlikely, trust me (Score:3, Interesting)
I would estimate that for 80% of my day, I have Google open.
Sure, I might not be looking at the page, in fact I'm probably not. I'm probably on one of the 15 tabs that I've opened from the search results. It might take me 5 minutes, or it might take me an hour to work through the results, but eventually I get back to the Google tab, and either search again, or close it.
If I close it, I'm willing to bet not 20 more minutes go by until I'm back there. I also have Google's personal homepage as my homepage, so it already has a head start.
No, I don't think this is going to hurt Google at all.
F'rinstance (Score:2)
Welcome to 2.0. (Score:2)
This "2.0" crap generally has nothing to do with data; it's generally related to bullsh*t, and that's why most of us don't "get it" as having a point. And in that context - page hits are an excellent metric for data; time-sink is an excellent metric for "feel-good" crud. I think a lot of us see TFA as pointless because of that difference. The non-data crap has no point, so a metric that measures something pointless is... pointless.
Ya have to reme
What they aren't telling you (Score:2)
Nielsen just isn't that clueful about the web, either 1.0 or 2.0 (blecch). Google will fall down the ratings? Does it matter? How much cash do they generate with ads that people click through to, versus, say, Yahoo or MSN? Nielsen is once agai
...and what does AJAX do? (Score:2)
Google earth (Score:3, Interesting)
More time on a site === less ad clicks ? (Score:2)
It is logical to conclude that if a user spends more time on site A than site B, then they will have trained their memory to remember the position of ads on site A and their eyes to quickly recognise any new ads appea
A victory for Adobe's Flash (Score:2)
Adobe must be in heaven, planning all of the extra sales of Flash...
Please wait for the rest of this response:
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And we care, why, exactly? (Score:2)
I'd be more interested in Googles 'rating' of this Neilsen site was than the other way around, if I care about 'ratings' of sites at all.
Basically what I'm trying to say is 'so what?'
Seriously? (Score:2)
But, seriously... Google sets their own ad rates (via bidding), and Nielsens
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
-- greg
Gmail, Docs, YouTube, etc.. (Score:2)
Netcraft (and Nielsen) have confirmed (Score:2)