July 18, 2007
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!