Kennet over at Investor Blogger sent me a Business Week article about how Nielsen now rates by time spent on a site instead of page views.
This month, Nielsen again flipped around a key ratings measure. It will now rank Web sites by how much time users spend on them, and de-emphasize total page views as the prevailing metric. Nielsen’s move is a nod to how habits and technologies on the Web have changed, thanks to video and applications like Ajax, which delivers fresh content to Web pages so users no longer need to click through more screens to see more stuff. The theory is that time spent is a better measure of (pain-inducing buzzword alert) “engagement” with a given Web site, although this remains a highly inexact science.
The new ranking doesn’t significantly reshape the Web’s top ten sites, but three sites that never made the top 10 in terms of page views entered the list based on engagement. The article is disappointing in the sense that it doesn’t list how much time users stay on those sites. It would have been nice to know so we can compare our engagement to the web’s top 10.
You can find engagement information in your Google Analytics dashboard. Most other third party stat tracker shows engagement time as well. Looking at my Analytics stats, I see that over the past 30 days, the average reader stays 9 minutes and 3 seconds on my blog. I am not really sure if that is good or bad so I like to ask you how long readers stay on your blog. Please post your engagement time in the comments.