After analyzing the impact of web 2.0 on the concept of unique visitor, I continue my tour of web 2.0 measurement metrics.

Time has become the scarce resource on the Internet. Everyone is trying to win the largest share of the cake: the time of the user. This time, is taken over the other media (television mostly). But the war between the sites has been hard, trying to get a piece of their visitors’ attention.

Web 2.0 has given time a central role. We can no longer be satisfied with the old way of measuring it. There used to be two methods so far: the panels (user-centric tools) and the site-centric tools.

In panels measurement (it was our former job), you install a software on the computer of volunteering Internet users. When the software is installed, possibilities are unlimited. We could therefore refine the measurement of time taking into account:

• is the page visible (not hidden behind another application for instance)
• is the panelist actively using the computer?

This has allowed us to provide a simple and complete definition of the time spent on a page: period during which the page can be viewed and the user is active.

At that time (we are talking about a century ago in 2005), the tools installed on sites were computing time in a much less robust way. The time spent on a page was got by measuring the time difference between this page and the following page.

Whether the user has immediately gone back (to another site), or if he has gone a few minutes (for any natural need), or he switched to Excel to his accounting, none of this was taken into account. There were many ways to correct time of a page in post-treatments (less than 30 minutes, or according to the mean and standard deviation of the page duration). But it would never be perfect. This measure was always overestimated, and worse, nobody was even able to know by how much it was overestimated.

When we (Nicolas and I) have moved from user-centric to site-centric tools, we found it would hurt our feelings too much to do less than what we had been doing before.

But with the Web 2.0, came Web 2.0 technologies. And our technological developments allow us to keep the same definition for our site-centric tool as we used to have in our user-centric one.
The only difference is that we deal with contents, not pages (I will make a article on the notion of content, but you should just know that, in many cases, a content is almost equivalent to the page in which it is displayed).

So: time spent on a content is the period during which the contents is visible and the user is active.

When you have a reliable definition of the concept of time, and when tools like ours can accurately measure the actual time spent, time can become a central indicator of web 2.0.

Why hasn’t it be true, so far? Because advertisements are bought by page views, which can be measured by the tools, while these tools always overestimate the time spent.

Time will really have won the day when advertising will be bought according to the total time spent on the site (see article in French).

And you can check it by yourself, on our demo page, that time is now a reliable metrics.