Nielsen NetRatings is hoping to change the way that websites audiences are measured. The change is significant enough so that it will re-order the rankings of major web properties.
The new ratings are based on how many total hours users spend at a web property and not on how many unique visitors go to the site. In other words, a property with 10 million unique visitors who spend two minutes a month each at the site would be trumped by one with 5 million visitors who spend 20 minutes each.
The flaw with the new system is that advertising is not bought by time-spent. It is bought by pageviews. And, at Google (GOOG) pageviews do not even matter. Google Adsense is based on user response to text ads. It is an advertising efficiency machine that has not been matched.
Under the new Nielsen rating, AOL does best. In May, people going to AOL spent and aggregate 25 billion minutes there. Yahoo! (YHOO) users spent 19.6 billion minutes, and Google users 7.4 billion.
By these measurements, Google should be in deep trouble. But it is not.
Internet consumers spending time at big web portals do things like look at e-mail, share photos, and hang around chat rooms and message boards. None of those activities have much use to marketers.
The new Nielsen system is a bust.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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