Source: Page Views No Longer Matter - Visit Length Becomes New Favorite - CashBulge - Bigger Pockets for Bigger Wallets

The longtime industry standard for ranking web pages has been demolished. Nielsen/NetRatings is a leading online measurement service and this Tuesday they announced plans to scrap page views, making visit length on each page the more important factor. Online video and other new technologies are making page views obsolete so now the time spent per page is what matters.

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 and investors a better picture of what sites are really popular.

As Howard Hughes would say, this is "the way of the future".

Soon, your quality score in various ad platforms will be measured (at least in part) by how long the visitor stays on your site. There is no substitute for quality user experience.

Hm, I'm at 00:02:45 average for 228,930 Visits and
690,839 Pageviews. Hopefully that is good.

3:03 for 1,061,153 visits, but has gone up a lot recently and will probably go up even more once the redesign and relaunch is complete. I think it REALLY depends on the kind of site. Time on site for a flash games site is going to be much different than for a price comparison site.

As a blogger, I think visit length is important to me since I can understand how my readers react on my contents. So far I use Google Analytics to keep track this. My average visit length is around 3:00.

"No longer matter" is the kind of overstatement only the blogosphere could produce.

There's no indication that the industry is willing to jump willy nilly into a new and untested metric, just that there's now another metric by which to judge a site's potential as a venue for reaching users and that it will receive an increasing amount of attention. By any real measurement, engagement not only isn't a favorite, it's not even on the radar. As soon as the first engagement based ads hit en masse, people will start gaming the engagement metrics just like they've been gaming the other metrics for years. I'd wait to see some level of market penetration from the advertisers before declaring that engagement is even a drop in the bucket, let alone a significant new metric and it'll be a long time before it's the new favorite, if ever. You sort of made this point toward the end of your blog post, I just thought the headline was disingenuous enough to deserve some comment.

I think it should be calculated from the pageviews and time on the site. Pageviews count as if you get alot of pageviews then you are likely to earn more.

Yeah, Business Week talked about this and it's been talked about elsewhere.

Nothing new really. I guess the new part would be the added momentum towards what metrics to prize.

Time on page or site can be dicey, because it doesn't account for the people who come, see a juicy ad and leave (and possibly come back later).

However, it's just part of the constant process of getting what one pays for, which is why more and more companies are shifting TV dollars into Internet dollars--accountability.

Man you guys have wicked stats. *goes off to look at own stats* hehee.