"Visit Duration" the new yardstick? Really?
By Vivek | July 9th, 2007 at 10:38 pm ET
From comScore to Hitwise to Nielsen/NetRatings, everyone wants to be in headlines for the obvious reasons. So today Nielsen/NetRatings made the big news by claiming that it not longer is tracking page views but instead will be tracking how long much time visitors spend on websites.
While the idea might look great on paper, I think Nielsen/NetRatings is one big step behind the world of web development, since most the newer products are exposed as webservices that are integrated only the remote sites.
Even if Nielsen aggregates the visit durations, it will only be for the sites where the content is getting consumed, but not for which widgets/webservices are getting actively consumed and for how long.
A better approach might be via the video and widget analytics program launched by Quantcast today. However, I have never really been confident of about the web stats numbers given out by Quantcast and would be looking out for reports from widget developers as to the actual usage patterns they observe and what Quantcast reports.
on July 10th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I’ve found the stats from Quantcast to be very accurate for my website - www.umm.edu, even before we added the “Quantified” code. I spot checked with 20 other web managers in my industry (US Hospitals) and they also confirmed that the Quantcast numbers matched the traffic they see.