Web Site Attention is the New Page View

R/WW takes a look at Compete’s attempt to track the engagement level of web sites by looking at more than just visitors and page views.

With increasing use of Flash and Ajax, using page views as a measure of a site’s popularity becomes more redundant (since only one page actually loads). To help marketers better research the popularity of web sites, they’ve introduced two new metrics:

• Attention: The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users
• Velocity: The relative change in daily Attention; velocity is used to determine the relative growth of a website compared to other sites

Here are the top 20 web sites in February, ranked by consumer attention, according to Compete.