Maybe I'm missing something. In all the breathless, "the pageview is dead" stories that came out last week surrounding Nielsen/NetRatings' press release that they will include "Total Minutes" as part of their ranking methodology, I couldn't find any information on how the measurement would work.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of trying to nail down a metric to succeed the Page View which (rewards poor site design and discourages linking away) but I want to make sure that we don't replace it with something worse. I often have multiple browser tabs open at any time and if I'm working on something like email, the whole browser goes into the background. Surely any urls that are "out of focus" are not being counted towards any kind of total time spent right?
The Nielsen/NetRatings site is almost useless with only two page marketing .pdf about the NetView product which will carry the new metric. I could ask our metrics gurus at Yahoo but I want to call this omission out publically so others can benefit from the answer.
I left a couple of comments out there pleading with someone with more time to call up Nielsen to find out more but nothing yet.
ReadWriteWeb : Tyranny of the Page View Nearly Over?
I've also emailed Nielsen PR and will post what I find out.
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