One of the long established metrics for measuring traffic to a website; page view is to be replaced by total time spent online. This announcement was made by the largest Internet benchmarking companies; Neilsen/NetRatings. The changes was said to have been brought about by the advent of web 2.0 which has significantly changed the way websites are used.
In the past, hits to a site was used to rank traffic, this was superseded by page view which is now about to give way to total time spent online.
Neilsen/NetRatings will not be discarding page view completely, it will just be relegated to the position of a second measurement of traffic, while time spent online becomes the primary metric.
User generated contents, the so called web 2.0 sites are expected to be rated higher using the new measure when compared with sites that attracts lots of traffic but do not keep hold of their visitors for very long. Sits such as YouTube and other large providers with IM are expected to be ranked higher in the new Neilsen/NetRatings rating system, while sites such as Google will be rated lower because it generates high amount of traffic but most visitors do not stay on the site for long.