Will Friedwald, Owner Of The Worlds Largest iTunes Collection
Has several libraries, totaling about 1200 gigs of music. Apple should call this guy up, offer him a new octocore in exchange collecting usage stats to make iTunes better.
There’s news today that will hopefully vastly improve my job and the job of anyone else who works for an online media company who’s main source of revenue is advertising. Nielsen NetRatings, the firm who gives the definitive word on the relative “worth” of your website, is changing their metric of choice from page views to time spent on site.
I don’t think it’s possible to overstate exactly how important this is. For at least a decade, page views have been the final word on how valuable your site is to advertisers. The traditional print world has circulation numbers, we in “new media” have page views. And while circulation scandals aren’t completely unheard of, those figures aren’t nearly as easy to game as are page views.
It pains me to say, but I’ve written whole blocks of code to allow for interstitial page refreshes, flash/javascript workarounds to force a page view after a certain number of views, broken user experiences, paginated articles (pagination! on the friggin web! seriously!) and all manner of distractions that have not necessarily rested easily on my little geek soul. All in the name of page views.
It seems that Nielsen has finally caught on to the fact that page views are not necessarily an accurate indicator of how users are spending their time (welcome to 2001 fellas). This is something the go-go online media world has known for at least 5 years, which is why you started seeing paginated articles (pagination! on the friggin web! seriously!) and slideshows that refresh the frame every slide. It’s also been a not-so-insignificant reason why we in online media have been slow to embrace new technologies like AJAX while new media startups have blazed those trails ahead of us.
The optimist in me wants to believe that this will bring us a step closer to creating media sites that flourish financially as well as provide the very best user experience possible for our readers. The shortsightedness of the page view metric often made those two goals mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, I’ve seen this game played out before (I was around when page views became the holy grail, after all) and I’m a bit hesitant to think that all will be right with the world. In the meantime, though, before some ad exec somewhere comes up with some way to game the new time spent on site metric (don’t think those crafty S.O.B.’s aren’t working on it already…), I’m hoping I’ll get to spend more time thinking about better media experiences and less time thinking about how to cleverly refresh the page.
The Twitter backlash continues
ABC News posted a screen grab of our site on their homepage today. Rock the meta!
Note to self: Throw out Padme’s old recipes. The after-effects of the “Naboo Burrito” are no fun when you are trapped in a pressure suit.
—Darth Vader, one of my favorite Twitterers
Buy this man a beer. Hell, buy one for Bill, too.
Google pre-announces web-based powerpoint competitor on their blog?
Huh? I guess pre-announcing is the new “beta”
Overrated blogger Steve Rubel Twitters that he doesn’t like PC Mag. They get their panties in a twist, kinda threaten to boycott Rubel’s employer Edelman (for what exactly? putting out a shitty tech shill mag?) and Rubel apologizes. Feh.