“In TV, we know there’s 20 minutes of ads to 40 minutes of content. We just don’t know that norm for the Internet yet. Time spent can’t measure that fully, but in the interim, it’s the best option,” says Scott Ross of NetRatings. Before these questions are answered, we may be on to the next new metric. NetRatings’ chief rival, comScore, told NEWSWEEK it will debut its own duration measurement later this year. It will probably measure not just time on a site, but how interactive that time is.
Anyone hoping for one simple stat to gauge Web popularity, like ratings for TV or circulation for newspapers, is likely to be disappointed. “You’re never going to have one metric that’s the holy grail of Internet measurement,” says Yahoo exec Peter Daboll.
