Nielsen Launches New Industry - Getting Paid To Do Nothing

Nielsen has just changed the metrics for website popularity. The long-abused page view, which led to the creation of 500 word articles spread out over 4-page on MSNBC.com, is being retired in favor of "length on site."

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

BusinessWeek's BlogSpotting and TechDirt, among others, lambast the idea, pointing to the weakness of using "length of time on site" as a metric, artificially inflating the importance of IM and video, while holding back the social networking sites like MySpace where clicking on links actually signifies interest.

Personally, I look at this as a great opportunity to make a lot of money. We know that some unethical (by his own admission) internet marketers like Jon Waraas are trying to sell comment spam, but with Nielsen's new push, finally a service can be built that doesn't cost anything to run, and doesn't annoy the general public. All I need is some venture capital, and we're ready to go!

Introducing - Pay Per Sit, the new service that pays YOU the internet surfer to open tabs on your browser and do nothing but earn cash for leaving them up! No more trying to work for your money - we can now open up a browser with multiple tabbing (Thank you Firefox and Safari), click to our client sites, and get paid to sit on them all day.

If you're a website looking to generate advertisers, for just $10 a day per person, we'll open your site on our desktops and go about our merry ways, racking up the length of time, and the dollars, for you.

Yes, that's a joke - but in all seriousness, why not? If that is really the metric, it's going to happen. And thus we come to the conclusion that measuring the value of a site is still a complicated issue, that is best done on a site by site and community by community basis.

Yes, that is a lot of hard work, but why is it that so many people in marketing want to simplify their jobs and still make the big bucks? If measurement were as easy as Page Rank (and many of you still do this), why do we need marketing people?

The true measure of influence is something that can be determined, but it requires a human filter (backed up by automatic measurement). I'm currently working on a measurement process that should provide visual confirmation of influence in online communities. It's not as fancy as some of the big boys, but when it's done, we'll be able to go to a Fortune 500 company and show them what websites in their industry are truly the most influential, as measured by their effect on other people, not their adherence to an easily-manipulated metric.