The Web: A New Metric, for Now

In July, when Nielsen// NetRatings rejiggered its Internet traffic measurements to emphasize time spent at a given site, almost everyone cheered—even some of the sites that fell in the rankings. The old way rewarded bad design; the new way is friendlier to video, gaming and messaging. The shift was meant to compare apples to apples (every service can measure by minutes, while some biggies, like AIM, weren't covered by the old "page view" metric), but it's created a bushel of confusion. Advertisers must decide if minutes at, say, eBay are equal to e-mail time. And YouTube, now credited for viewers who watch long videos (before, each counted as just one page), must solve where and when to sprinkle ads.

"In TV, we know there's 20 minutes of ads to 40 minutes of content. We just don't know that norm for the Internet yet. Time spent can't measure that fully, but in the interim, it's the best option," says Scott Ross of NetRatings. Before these questions are answered, we may be on to the next new metric. NetRatings' chief rival, comScore, told NEWSWEEK it will debut its own duration measurement later this year. It will probably measure not just time on a site, but how interactive that time is.

Anyone hoping for one simple stat to gauge Web popularity, like ratings for TV or circulation for newspapers, is likely to be disappointed. "You're never going to have one metric that's the holy grail of Internet measurement," says Yahoo exec Peter Daboll.