brinking - nabeel hyatt: A meme begins: Compete announces the Attention 200

I love watching a new idea take hold. Evhead, and some others have been recently chatting about how Ajax & Widgets has killed the relevance of the page view, and we need to start measuring the web by time spent instead -- what I've been calling Attention.

Boston-based Compete seems to agree as they have announced The Compete Attention 200. I spoke with Andy Kazeniac at Compete and he said they compute this Attention metric by analyzing clickstream and timestamps, adding "those time numbers are then aggregated and given as a percentage of all time spent on the internet." Kudos to Compete for reacting quickly to a new trend.

What does this new data tell us about the Internet? Well, I categorized the top 50 to see what kinds of sites garner the most attention.

A couple things that seem to come out of this data:

I expected old media (CNN.com, ESPN.com) to have a much bigger percentage of attention simply because of brand power. This suggests that we are further down the Web 2.0 curve than maybe we thought. People simply don't spend a lot of time with old media online.
Commerce is the #1 category -- which just says we must be good consumerist Americans after all. Note that this includes everything from Amazon.com to BankofAmerica.com.
Gaming is the #3 category, only beaten by Search/Info (Google, Wikipedia) and Commerce. Again, wow. While aggregators like Pogo and Wild Tangent dominate, it's good to see that even individual properties like GAIA and Runescape get in there.
Video/Photos and in general exclusively broadband media is still pretty rare. YouTube is the only big player. I suspect this will change over time and we'll be seeing the likes of Heavy, JibJab, and Next New Networks peak in there in the coming months.

more about this data, and a few exceptions, after the jump...

Only three sites in the top 50 did not fit these categories: Match.com, Careerbuilder, and Monster. Everything else from Photobucket to NFL.com fit pretty cleanly.
This is not the long tail. By only looking at the top 50 sites, this data gives a particular viewpoint at the very height of the tail on the Internet. Since only the top 10 sites garner 1% or more of our viewing, that skews the results heavily. I am sure this under-represents a category like Adult in which we hear people spend plenty of time, just that there is no single major player.

A few notes on how I did this. First, some sites have multiple offerings (Yahoo offers Search, Office 2.0, Gaming, etc). For those properties I allowed them to count in multiple categories, but perhaps surprisingly this was really not the norm, after MSN, Yahoo, and Google virtually all of the top 50 were in just one of these categories (YouTube in Video, Ebay in Commerce, Runescape in Gaming, etc).

I look forward to doing a little more comprehensive look at the overall 200 later, and would love to see Compete find some way that we could see how this trend plays out over the long tail. It will likely take years for this to be a widely adopted metric, but this is a great start.

PS - Does anyone else think that it is ridiculous that Google Reader doesn't include search? You know, they make search engines, right?