A whole new model?

From: Alex Tillman <alex_at_webtillman.com>
Date: Tue 19 Feb 2002 22:21:44 -0600

Ilor, a new search engine that is growing by "word of
mouth" fairly rapidly (much like Google did) is now
partnering with Ask Jeeves-directhit / Teoma, which
brings up an interesting point. (Yes, I can hear the
collective yawns at this, but please stick with me, I
do have a point.)

Ilor has just dumped its partnership with Google, the
current sweetheart of search engines, for a newer
technology that will list results that factor not only
the most "popular" sites (in terms of number of
visitors) but also how long visitors remain on that
site. This aspect of time spent viewing a site is a
variable I have never really considered before, and
raises some interesting ideas. If you can leapfrog up
the rankings by increasing the amount of time users
spend on your site, wouldn't you have to take a whole
new approach to content design? (Right now a
prevailing strategy is to design for the short
attention span generation- a la MTV type quick cuts)

So my specific questions are these:

Has anyone actually restructured their content to get
average page view times to increase? (We track our
page view times through Webtrends and were pleased
when they actually DECREASED after putting new
navigation in place. We thought this meant visitors
could now more easily find the content they wanted...
"cut to the chase", so to speak. This new model,
however, turns that on its head.)

Are there any statistics on average page view/ site
view times? (I know that ours vary wildly from month
to month, from a low of about 1 min per page to a high
of over 4. That is all without any major content
changes!)

Has anyone looked at relating CPM advertising rates to
time of exposure? (I think this may have been
discussed before, but I'm sure if it was an academic
discussion, or if someone had actually tried it. Also,
this would NOT be the same as "session" pricing, since
that still doesn't tell you how long- in seconds- your
ad was exposed for.)

Is there software that could even measure reliably the
actual time an ad was displayed? (So instead of paying
for number of exposures, maybe they get billed in
"exposure minutes".)

Obviously this won't change anything overnight, but if
it eventually catches on (and if the length of time
spent on a site actually correlates, at all, to the
perceived quality of a site, then it probably will-
since their results will be seem much more "credible"
than a traditional search engine) we could very well
be looking at the birth of an entirely new model for
web design, SEO strategy and ad serving. (Of course
the way my addled mind works is to think in "big
picture mode", so I may be totally overlooking some
critical details.)

Any thoughts?



Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 22:21:44 CST