For the past god knows how many years now, a site’s popularity has been ranked by the amount of hits or visits it receives. It is a bit unfair of course, since you can generate massive amounts of traffic, but saying that your site receives five million hits a day doesn’t mean five million people visit it, or if they stay and actually use your site.

Anyway, has decided to drop ranking sites by hits/visits. So is this a new era for websites? Their reasoning is fairly solid:

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. “We’re changing our stance on how the data should be” used.

That reasoning incidentally, pushes Google down the ranks a tiny bit, and pushes sites like YouTube upwards (since people tend to watch videos). But that isn’t going to faze a lot of the big players I don’t think. Google isn’t going to change how they operate just because of Nielsen’s decision, and I doubt Yahoo! will, or MSN, and so on.

Nielsen is doing what matters, monitoring and rating websites according to popularity, -REAL- popularity, not just who can garner the most page views.