If you’ve ever experienced the StumbleUpon effect, you know that counting clicks can be misleading. You wake up one morning to find that your traffic numbers have skyrocketed after your blog post became a featured item on the popular bookmarking site. 12,000 hits in 24 hours! Amazing. But the majority of those people only stayed as long as it took to hit the Stumble button again – maybe 2 seconds. No engagement, which means no ad views and they’re probably not coming back.

This is why YouTube is now looking at Time Watched as the main component for ranking a video’s popularity. Now, instead of being rewarded for people who click then move on, content creators will get points for viewers who stay with the video to the end.

For years, TV networks have been selling commercial time based on the estimated number of people who watch a show on TV. Want to advertise on a popular show with a successful track record? It’s going to cost you. And since there are a limited number of spots on any single TV show airing, you may have to fight and give up other concessions in order to secure your space.

After the show airs on TV, in many cases, it moves to the internet. Only in this case, advertisers aren’t banging down the doors, offering up big bucks to run their ads on the show. Why? Mostly because of the notion that only viewers aren’t as valuable as TV viewers. And though that may have been true a few years ago, it’s not true anymore.