Until recently, the standard barometer for the success of a website has been the number of page views it receives. However, the metric is much less meaningful than it used to be; fast-growing trends like AJAX and streaming video enable users to engage with more content than ever before without leaving the current page.
Nielsen, the leading online measurement service, recently announced that it will use the amount of time users spend on a site, rather than the number of page views a site receives, to determine its rankings. While it is difficult to predict how this will affect the top website’s strategies, the move has the potential to make sites more usable. Many popular sites sacrifice user experience in favor of increasing their pages views. MySpace (http://usability.about.com/od/webcontent/a/MySpace.htm), for example, requires users to click through numerous pages to accomplish simple tasks that could handled in a more elegant fashion on a single page using an AJAX widget. Nielsen’s new ranking methods may discourage the practice of stretching content and functionality across multiple pages.
Of course, counting page views is still a valuable metric. It can suggest overall volume of traffic on a site and suggests which sections of a site are being used the most. Furthermore, time spent on a site does not directly correspond to utility. Google Search, whose rank is sure to be upset by the new Nielsen ranking system as it serves pages that are designing to send users to other sites as fast as possible.