• Associated Press via Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, July 10, 2007 11 AM

Nielsen/NetRatings today is expected to announce an unprecedented move in the practice of Web site measurement: It is planning to do away with rankings based on total page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at Web sites. New broadband technologies like online video and other embedded Web applications, called "widgets," are making page views less relevant in determining a Web site's usage.

Nielsen already uses its panel data to measure the average time consumers spend on a given Web site, in addition to the number of user sessions, but now it will focus on presenting both metrics, to give advertisers, investors and analysts a much broader picture. Nielsen will still measure page views, but no longer rank Web sites by them.

The move comes in the wake of decisions by major Web firms to give providers more content on each page. Publishers find that users don't like having to click on so many Web pages to access content. Yahoo and others are increasingly using embedded Web apps like Ajax to update data automatically so users don't need to pull up new pages. These technologies result in longer sessions but fewer page views. Said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. "We're changing our stance on how the data should be used."

Read the whole story at Associated Press via Wall Street Journal »