Nielsen and Net Rankings: Still Not Getting It

Nielsen/NetRatings announced this week that they were going to change the way they rank web sites, moving from prioritizing page views in determining sites' popularity to "total minutes" and "total sessions."

What was immediately clear from the announcement and the initial coverage is that the Powers That Be in the web popularity game are still not getting it, and neither are the media outlets, many of whom are probably buying ads based on this antiquated system.

Forbes references "increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience." Ajax is a trick? I suppose that makes Flash "hocus pocus" and Javascript "that newfangled thing all the kids are using nowadays." Sure, Ajax is one of the things that probably reduces the number of traditional page views, but who thought that page views were ever a great metric?

The Editors Weblog takes an even more entertaining approach with its concerns over newspapers "gaming" the rankings with videos to stay on top of the rankings. Let's be honest; people are moving more and more to a tabbed approach to browsing, making the new metric even more useless than the old one. Right at this second, I have 97 tabs open in my Firefox window, some of which have been open for DAYS. I've actually accidentally joined MyBlogLog communities due to machine shut-downs and restarts using a session manager; MBL saw it as 10 visits even though it was always the same page I was saving for an article idea. I wasn't actively engaged on the site; it was just sitting there.

InformationWeek chimes in with concerns that the new system will unfairly punish sites like Google that are designed for quick use while directing popularity egoboo to gaming sites, where users might play for hours.

It's apparent fairly quickly that the system isn't moving as fast as the technology it's supposed to be ranking. I'm not sure what a better system would look like, but I know this isn't it.