"...news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the
company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there."
Pageviews have been barely useful for quite some time now. As a result, many (including myself with a proposal for AttentStreams and AudientStreams) have called for a change in standard measurements. Compete.com has even moved to their definition of 'Attention'.
While Time Spent is a little more useful, it is not perfect. For example it does not factor out people who leave pages open in tabs and does not indicate a level of actual interactivity with the page/content/service.
Interestingly though, Particls (the application not the website) has an enormous time-spent value. We average more than 7 hours per user per day of time spent because the application is designed to persist in front of users all day (in the form of a news ticker - and soon - some other interesting presentation styles).
As a result, our publisher partners who distribute white label versions of Particls are experiencing huge jumps in their overall time-spent engaged with their brand, content and advertising.
Learn more about the white label partner program here: www.particls.com/intouch