SportsGuy reported a few months ago about The Page View - dying stat? The prophecy certainly seems to be coming true.

Nielsen Scraps Web Page View Rankings

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

...and so it begins.

Makes sense, though. In many cases, the page view is a pointless stat.

If your users are not engaged (spending time on the site) and/or actually taking action (buying, posting, etc.), then you really have very little to trade on.

4 million pv a month is nice, but if the average time on site is only 3 seconds per visitor, there's little long-term value in those users...

Nice find JQ.

What is teh difference (if any) of time spent on a website and bounce rate?

It is a little complicated. The time spent on a page depends on many factors. If the page has lots of content like How-to-Perm-Your Hair, How to change your car's Engine Oil etc, obviously the time spent on reading the content is going to be long. On the other hand people looking up phone numbers to contact, spend few seconds in the page. You get the drift.

As for the bounce rate - I will quote from Wiki "The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a web site is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a web site per session divided by the total number of web site visits."

Page views are very important if you sell advertising based on a CPM basis.

Page views are very important if you sell advertising based on a CPM basis.

Still, volume won't matter much if those users are not engaged.

Sure, you'll fill your quota for delivering ad impressions, but because the users weren't engaged, and likely never clicked an ad, the advertisers get no value from the expsoure.

To expand on the "dying things" topic, I also think that CPM-based ad campaigns are going to go the way of the dinosaur. As advertisers become increasingly more savvy, they will move toward action-only payment models in ever greater numbers.

Yes, there will always be a base of businesses who "don't know any better" and will run CPM-based campaigns for years to come, but the big companies are already moving their spends away from these types of campaigns - have been for a couple years now.

Convert, or die - that's the new phrase to describe banner-centric ad campaigns these days - and the turn around cycles are usually not 30 days, but 3 or 4.

I agree; if there's no visitor action, the ad was wasted, and page views are increasingly irrelevant.

It's no accident that Google is trying to move on to Commission Junction's territory, seeking not just a click, but a positive commitment.

Advertisers have been slow to wake up to a medium that allows them to measure, follow up and torture those who see their ads. But now the penny has dropped, expect worse to come