Neilson's new web metric likely to hurt Google, help Gaming

Today Neilsen/Netratings announced that they are ceasing to use the Page View and will instead be using the Attention metric I've been talking about. When the measurement of the web migrated from hits to pageviews, there were a whole raft of winners and losers in the online world. In many ways we are how we are measured; it effects the way press and public perceive us, and our ability to attract partners, advertisers, and employees.

So, when how we are measured changes, it's hard to underestimate the disruptiveness. As quoted at Read/Write Web, AP gives some insights:

"Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third."

Tomorrow Compete.com will be releasingCompete released their latest Attention 200 listing, and they were nice enough to give me a sneak peak. Comparing that to the list of top page view sites from Comscore and others you can see there are going to be clear winners and losers from this shake up.

Looking at page views versus attention from Compete.com it looks like search (including deeper experiences like general social networking (MySpace, Facebook), games (Pogo, Runescape), and vertical social networks (DeviantArt, Flickr) get a huge boost in this new world of the web.

(thx for the heads up Jason).