Statistics for Web 2.0

The trend towards a dramatic increase in the interactivity of the sites, which came along with the so-called Web 2.0 era, brought not only positive results, but also many complex problems that have not yet been resolved. One of these difficulties is the calculation of statistics of visits to resources that use updated pages without reloading them. After all, the old methods of accounting, which are used in the statistics systems of companies such as Alexa, comScore and Hitwise, focus primarily on the number of page views and can "lose" a significant portion of visitors.

But these three companies are leaders in the field of statistics and their information can seriously affect the image of any resource. Take for example cartographic services: by going to the page once, the user can spend more than one hour in enthusiastic wanderings. There is only one viewing (or hit), but this in no way reflects a person’s real interest in this service.

Recently, a lot of noise made the news that the social network MySpace has overtaken in attendance in the United States the permanent leader in recent years - the portal Yahoo.com with all its subdomains. Yahoo’s management was rightly indignant at such a survey conducted by comScore , and opinions began to come in from everywhere that we witnessed confrontation between analytic firms, each of which seeks to draw more attention to itself.
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However, last week, comScore itself attracted the attention of truly interesting and commendable statements. In a press release, according to Ars Technica , the company described all the injustices of the existing methods of assessing the popularity, and hence the investment attractiveness of players on the Internet market. Its CEO, Magid Abraham, said (perhaps with a bit too much complacency and pomp) the following: “comScore is proud to continue to carry the torch of industrial innovator with the development of a new set of metrics that will effectively mark the Web 2.0 landscape with new advanced dimensions of users' attention and potential advertising effectiveness. ”

As happens in such cases, the details about these newest “metrics” are hushed up, but the very emergence of such an idea is encouraging.