The New York Times (AP) is reporting the Nielsen ratings group is revising how they gauge web page rankings. They're shifting from the nebulous metric hits to actual time spent on the site.

Anyone consuming newspapers or magazines online knows just how bad the attempts to inflate hits have gotten. From splitting up single articles into multiple pages to going so far as to hiring in-house designers and engineers marked with the explicit task of finding ways to make users click more. Some sites will use javascript to continually reload pages or loop through photo slideshows in the hopes that the reader has left the computer with the site open in a background window.

Hits have always been an almost pointless metric. Only slightly less so is the unique user metric. Measuring time spent on a site is still a dubious science at best, but combined with unique user numbers and return percentages things become slightly more concrete. I hope sites will be encouraged to pursue cleaner design and better user experience by this change.