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Filed under: Internet, News, Google, AOL

Nielsen changes the way it measures web traffic

Nielsen rankings May 2007
One of the largest companies tracking web traffic is changing its measuring stick. The Associated Press reports that Nielsen/NetRatings will replace page views with time spent on a website as its primary tool for measuring traffic.

Folks have known for a while now that page views don't really tell you what's happening with your site. For example, some of the most visited sites on the internet are search engines. But visitors pop in and out quickly, as they use the tools to find the sites they're really looking for. On the other hand, Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube can offer up loads of content without a single page refresh.

Nielsen will still track page views, but will rank sites based on the new metric.

The move means that Google will drop from the 3rd most popular site on the internet to the 5th, while this blog's parent company moves from 6th place to first. Why the big jump? Because the minutes users spend on AOL Instant Messenger get included in the new rankings, meaning that Americans spent 25 billion minutes using AOL in May, according to the latest Nielsen rankings.

Filed under: Business, Internet, News, Web services

Does sampling user data give an accurate picture of traffic?


If you've ever played the web traffic game, where big numbers can mean big advertiser dollars --and small numbers can mean going bust -- you're probably keenly aware of the lousy accuracy of "panel" based sampling methods used to rate and rank sites against each other.

BusinessWeek takes a look at how inaccuracy means trouble for some web upstarts, and at the ongoing struggle by some to straighten out the numbers game. Digg, for example, recently hired heavy-hitting web analytics firm Web Side Story to get to the bottom of a massive gap in their own numbers and those presented by traffic rating firms. Digg's own data showed 15 million uniques per month, while comScore put them at 1-2 million unique visitors for the same period. The difference in ad dollars for a gap like that are enormous, but percentage-wise they can't begin to compare to the plight of many smaller web-fish. "For many, traffic numbers decide not just the price of an ad but whether the advertiser inquires about an ad at all"

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