Neilsen//NetRatings recently announced that they will be changing the way they rank sites they track:
Tyranny of the Page View nearly over?, from Read/Write Web
Who cares? Advertisers use this data to help them understand the traffic patterns of the sites they are advertising on, so anybody who relies on advertising as part of their business model should be paying attention.
And lots of consumer sites are designed, consciously or otherwise, to take advantage of the existing measure. For example, ever wonder why the NZ Herald site regularly splits articles over multiple pages?
At the moment the most popular way of comparing sites in NZ is by unique browsers – i.e. the number of distinct people that visit a site over the course of a day, week or month.
By this measure Trade Me is the clear leader:
| Rank | Site | Unique Browsers |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Trade Me | 3,616,165 |
| 2nd | Stuff | 2,008,982 |
| 3rd | NZ Herald | 1,684,464 |
| 4th | MSN | 1,357,486 |
| 5th | Xtra | 1,006,726 |
| 6th | Air New Zealand | 994,135 |
| 7th | TVNZ | 839,063 |
| 8th | Westpac | 646,257 |
| 9th | Whitepages | 624,036 |
| 10th | ASB Bank | 608,092 |
Ranking based on total time on site (unique browsers x frequency of visits x average session duration) doesn’t really change the order much, but if you look at the actual numbers you can see just how dominant Trade Me is relative to the other big NZ sites:
| Rank | Site | Total time (mins) |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Trade Me | 366,878,020 |
| 2nd | NZ Herald | 41,127,592 |
| 3rd | Stuff | 32,358,673 |
| 4th | NZ Dating | 31,734,424 |
| 5th | Xtra | 22,052,836 |
| 6th | MSN | 16,553,184 |
| 7th | FindSomeone | 9,995,179 |
| 8th | Air New Zealand | 9,062,535 |
| 9th | Seek | 8,235,827 |
| 10th | Whitepages | 5,251,263 |
Data from Neilsen//NetRatings for June 2007
Note that NZ Dating (the 28th biggest site by page views) and FindSomeone (the 34th) both make the top 10 when ranked by time. TVNZ drops from 7th to 24th.
And, yes, that’s over 366 million minutes we collectively spent on Trade Me during June, or just under 700 years!
Interesting.
Before we all get too carried away though, Joel on MarkerBlog makes an excellent point:
Neilsen//NetRatings quits smoking in favour of harder drugs
Nice!
Hi Rowan,
Good post on the what is happening in NZ vs. Overseas. You might want to check out this thread on the IAB website which goes into a little bit more detail on the New Zealand situation.
It’s funny how quickly Trademe’s numbers become insanely large! From those numbers we can gather that New Zealanders like consuming, dating and reading the news… It makes you wonder what else we like doing that no one has yet thought to offer on the web. Cool post!
hiya – further to joel’s blog, i think it’s worth pointing out that time spent on a website has a different type of relevance for different sites, relative to their purpose. as a result, the total time on site is even less meaningful than unique browsers, if you’re simply ranking sites. how so, you say? – well, if i spend a long time on, say, air new zealand’s site, it probably means i can’t find what i want – which is bad news for air nz, so they will look to minimise time on site… whereas, if i spend a long time on trademe, or the herald, that’s great because i’m surfing around, checking things out, possibly bidding on and / or listing lots of auctions – and, most importantly in this context – viewing ads. so, trademe and the herald want to maximise time on site, and page impressions, so as to strengthen their better pitch to media buyers… note that those sites that don’t want long time-on-site scores are also often sites that don’t have advertising… (air nz, the banks, etc.)