• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, July 12, 2007

This week the who's who of entertainment and media gathered at Herb Allen's annual Sun Valley media festival or slipped into the iMeme conference in San Francisco, both big news events in these otherwise warming days of mid-July. But, the biggest news in the online ad industry this week has been Nielsen/Net Ratings' announcement that it is changing its most important Web media measurement metric, replacing the page view with time spent. The new regime for one of the two primary online media measurement companies is going to shift the focus away from how many pages users view to how long they are viewing online content instead.

This has been coming for some time. It was only a year ago that I wrote here about "Doomed Page Views." Page views have been endangered ever since high bandwidth become a reality in American homes and enabled everyone to watch video on their PCs -- and since new scripting languages that separate the page from the content (like Ajax and Flash and Javascript) began to take over many site homepages, enabling robust and interactive content delivery without clicking on additional pages.

Whither the page view? While certainly the page view will never be the same again, should we forget about it forever more? I don't think so. By no means does N/NR's announcement, or the page view's declining relevance, mean that it will be never be heard from again. Why? Because we really don't know yet what to replace it with.

Yes, time spent is a valuable metric, and it is one that will become more and more important in our industry. It can capture some notion of user engagement, and that is a very good thing. However, the page view captures user-initiated actions -- the clicking on links and opening up of pages - and it is a direct and measurable driver of ad impressions, the lingua franca of the CPM (cost per thousand), one of our core ad measurement and monetization metrics in both online and offline media.

Not so time spent. At this point, we are going to have lots and lots of methodology issues trying to understand time spent (which, certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying to use it). With the proliferation of browsers with tabs and desktop applications like instant messenger and portable content, and service objects like widgets and really wide computer screens with extraordinary resolution, most of us today have no fewer than a dozen things (Web pages, IMs, etc.) open on our desktop at any one time

Should we count time spent for each and every open application or browser on a user's desktop at any given moment? With ubiquitous broadband in both home and office these days, most of our machines are on for hours and hours. Should we count all of that time? What about instant messengers and Facebook pages? They are always open. What about bathroom breaks? We complain about those to TV people. Are we now vulnerable here? What about new abuses? Just as Web designers learned years and years ago to design sites that had navigation that would artificially inflate page views (yes, you all know that it's been happening for years), are we now going to see designers popping new browser windows that sit in the background (pop-unders) where nobody sees them and closes them, just to get more time-spent credit?

Wow. Lots to think about. Don't get me wrong. I applaud the move to time spent. I just think that we will need to take our time learning what it is and how to measure it most accurately, and at the same time shouldn't be too quick to throw away the page view. It has served us well and still has lots of value to give. What do you think?