Nielsen Nixes Page View Measurement

Everyone has heard of the Nielson Ratings regarding TV viewership. However, not a lot of people know that they are also measuring website traffic. In a recent press release it was decided by the ratings company that they were no longer going to be using page views as a measure of a sites popularity. They will still be providing the numbers but won't be formally ranking them. Instead, they are placing the emphasis on the total minutes viewed.

IMHO, I would tend to agree. This gives a more accurate picture of what people are actually looking at and a better determination of viewing quality. However, some industry experts are claiming that time spent on AOL's instant messenger and other similar aps are now going to be counted and can skew the results. With that being said, the new form of measurement is going to have the opposite effect on sites like blogs where users spend much more time actually reading the content.

This decision was made and influenced by new technology like AJAX which allows users to spend more time interacting with a page and not having to re-load the page content from the server.

I just have one question. Since online advertising is gauged by impressions, won't the impressions go down under this this new rating system? Will this de-value the ads or will ad providers have to adjust their measuring to accommodate this new metric?