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Sometimes the way you measure something affects your perception. That's certainly the case with web stats, where using a different metric can deliver a totally different set of winners: and yet people love to have "Top X" lists, so the inexact science of web stats is largely ignored.
On Tuesday, Nielsen/NetRatings will announce that it will no longer rank top sites on the web by pageviews: instead, it will measure the time spent on a site. "Total minutes"" (of all users spent on the site) is the new Holy Grail. That's great, you would think, since sites that generate more pageviews than they need to (eg. MySpace) will drop in the rankings, while those that engage users for long periods (Yahoo) will see a boost in stats. Video sites will also see an increase in rank.
But what about hyper-efficient sites like Google, which work optimally when they find you the best result first? In this new world of total time spent, Google actually loses out (with the exception of its YouTube property). And strangely, AOL will get a huge boost because Nielsen is counting time spent on AIM. If I leave GMail open all day, will that also count? Perhaps I need to interact with a site every so often for it to count (and if so, how often)?