Nielsen Kiling Pageview? Not Exactly

Three things that update other reports in how Nielsen will stop using the pageview as a metric:

First, they're only doing away with the ranking of sites by pageview. If you subscribe to their data, you'll still be able to see the number of pageviews the site generated, and do your own ranking, either absolute or within a category. Nielsen's just going to stop doing their rankings that way, instead rankings sites by "time spent," the total number of minutes users spend on the site. Some stories that talked about the "death of the pageview" made it seem otherwise.

Second, they say they have a unique, patented "desktop meter" that helps keep the measurement of "time spent" accurate by measuring what's actually "active" on a page at any given moment. If you have, say, 11 tabs open in a Firefox browser, Nielsen will count only the one that's on top. If you start working on a locally based spreadsheet, it stops counting the Web page. And so on. (Of course, this doesn't factor for if you leave a Web page open and go to the bathroom, but still, it's better than nothing.)

And third, the new measures are being released July 6, not this month, as has been reported elsewhere. Nielsen may have said in April that it would be in June.

This all based on reporting today.

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