Improve your site’s rankings: build crappier interfaces!

Nielsen/NetRatings has just decided that page views aren’t the key indicator of a sites popularity anymore and that, instead, time spent on the site is what now matters.

I guess this makes sense coming from the mindset of TV ratings, and it certainly has some merits, but also some huge drawbacks.

People might hang out on Wikipedia for an inordinate amount of time because of the great content.  BUT…people might also hang out on BigShoppingSiteIncorporated for an inordinate amount of time because the checkout process in so poorly designed that they simply get lost on the way to the SUBMIT ORDER button.

So, if you’re trying to win over Nielsen ratings, it seems that you have two options: design a web site with really great content and engage people, or design a web site that people need to use to complete a task and just make sure the process takes a half hour to complete.

Now I’m sure (hope?) that Nielson is wise and is only going to be using this statistic to compare like-industry sites to each other. And if they just focus on entertainment sites, this might actually be a very good indicator of popularity.