New Nielsen Metrics Put Google In Fifth Place

Nielsen announced today that it has changed the main way it measures the popularity of websites, measuring time spent on a website more than page views. The change in methodology puts Google in fifth place among time spent, even though it has the most unique visitors, while AOL is the top dog on the internet.
I’ve taken the chart and remixed it to show you how things are different between time spent and unique visitors:

If you combine YouTube and Google’s numbers and the Microsoft and MSN numbers, Google has a huge lead, and even with the combined numbers only gets fourth place. Microsoft’s combined numbers don’t move it up, but it does halve the distance between it and Yahoo.
Apparently, Google gets 67.15 minutes per user, while AOL gets an astounding 272.92 minutes per user. YouTube, despite having all those videos (which you’d think would keep people around), only […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg