Nielsen: Time per User

February 21, 2009

I like the tables and data that ZDNet makes available. It delivers the old Predicast File 16 punch without the online connect and type charges of by gone days. The table “Top Web Brands in December 2008” here ruffled my thinning pin feathers. Let me highlight three companies’ “time” and capture the thoughts that flapped through my addled goose mind. Here are the values that puzzled me:

Yahoo, according to Nielsen, attracted 117 million visitors and each visitor spent 3 minutes and 12 seconds per visit. The barking dog AOL Media Network attracted 86 million visitors and each visitor spent 3 minutes and 41 seconds per visit. YouTube.com (one of the top five sites in terms of traffic according to some stats cats) attracted 81 million visitors and each visitor spent 54 seconds on the site. The site able to attract visitors and make them go away fastest was Amazon with 61 million visitors and each visitor spent 34 seconds on the site.

Now these data strike me as evoking more questions than they answer. For example:

Yahoo gets me to stick around because the system is so slow. Email is not usable from some countries. Yahoo’s gratuitous “Do you want to cache your email?” is nuts. If I am in Estonia on Monday and Warsaw on Tuesday, what do you think? These “sticky” values are indicative of some other factors, which the ZDNet presentation does not address. I think Yahoo gets a high score because of the amount of time required to perform basic email operations. I fondly note the inadequate “ying” server because I have to sit and wait for the darn thing to deliver data to me.
The Amazon number is just odd. I buy books and a few on sale odds and ends. The Amazon system also demonstrates sluggishness. There’s the need to turn on “one click”. That takes time because I can not easily spot the verbiage that allows me to turn on one click and have the system remember that as my preference. Then there is the sluggish rendering of items deep in an Amazon results list. I find the search system terrible, and I waste a lot of time looking for current titles that * are * available for the Kindle. The long Amazon pages take time to browse. In short, how can a visitor get in and out of Amazon in and average time of 34 seconds. Something’s fishy.
The AOL numbers are similar to Yahoo. Maybe system latency is the way to improve dwell time.
The YouTube.com number makes no sense at all. YouTube.com offers short videos and now longer fare. YouTube.com demographics are skewed to the trophy generation. How can a YouTube.com visitor wade through the clutter on the various YouTube.com Web pages, wait for the video to buffer, and then get out of Dodge City in 54 seconds. Something’s off track here.

I am confident that Nielsen’s analysts have well crafted answers. I wonder, however, if Phil Nielsen would accept those answers. I know I would not unless I could look at the method of data collection, the math behind the calculation, and the method for cranking out the tidy time values. I sure hope no former Wall Street quants were involved in these data because I would be really suspicious.

My hunch is that the simple reason the numbers strike me as weird is that these data are flawed, maybe in several different ways. In today’s economic climate, numbers are like Jello. I never liked Jello.

Stephen Arnold, February 21, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, News, Online (general)

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.