Ghost of Midnight

New Web Traffic Measure

Frank Barnako reported last week about a new measure for website “stickiness.”  ComScore.com states:

“As technologies like AJAX change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.  “The introduction of these new metrics based on ‘visits’ provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.”

A couple examples:

Facebook.com, the 36th most-visited site with 16.7 million unique visitors in February, proved to be one of the most engaging sites, ranking second with 23.6 average visits per visitor during the month.

Weatherbug, the 48th most-visited property, was the fifth-most engaging property (as measured by average visits per visitor.

This is interesting to me because the traditional measure of online traffic don’t paint a very accurate portrait of Front Porch Forum.  Our service works differently than much of the web and I’m glad to see additional measures coming online.