New York - Ratings provider Nielsen/NetRatings announced on Tuesday that it plans to shift from the current industry standard of using page views and unique visitors to measure the popularity of a website, to a new system that will tally the total minutes each user spends and total number of sessions.

The company cited the rise of online video and other new technologies that have users spending more minutes on fewer Web pages than before.

Many advertisers also complained that the ratings provided using the current system by Nielsen and comScore were inaccurate, prompting the Interactive Advertising Bureau to ask the firms to revise their methodologies.

Under Nielsen's new system, AOL and Yahoo become the top sites for May, due in large part to the number of minutes their visitors spent on their respective instant messaging services. AOL users spent 25 billion minutes on the site during the month, while Yahoo users spent 19.6 billion minutes.

Related Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/media/10online.html (AP)

http://tinyurl.com/2d4msl (Reuters)

http://www.nielsenmedia.com