The Gong Show

Update: This post by Nabeel is a great argument in favor of the time spent on a site metric. Time Spent per Vists * Visits is fairly accurate way to measure engagement, and that analysis leads to interesting conclusions about the importance and size of pogo.com. I wish I had read this before I wrote this post below.

Original Post: This Compete post ranking the top 20 websites based on time spent online was very interesting to me. It satiated both my voyeuristic and statistical needs for the day.

I was surprised to see Pogo.com so high on the list. I know that casual games are huge, but I doubt that Pogo is the biggest casual games portal (I suspect Yahoo owns that crown). Of course, Yahoo is ranked higher than Pogo on this list, which makes sense… but if I’m correct that Pogo is at best the #2 player in the casual games, then it’s remarkable just how big the causal games space must be such that users spent an equal amount of time on the second largest casual games site compared to YouTube and Facebook combined! I guess games generally consume more time than watching videos or stalking friends’ profiles.

Also, one of the reasons why I like this list so much (enough to blog about it) is because time spent viewing a site is a far better metric for engagement than pageviews. I don’t know how accurately Compete can measure viewing time (in other words, I know nothing about their methodology), but if it is in fact accurate, then I think this is a much better way to rank the largest sites in the world.

For example, Craigslist is often quoted as the 7th biggest site English-speaking site on the web. But, that’s because Craigslist’s site is design to generate TONS of pageviews, where as on Pogo.com, users could spend hours and hours on a single game generating zero pageviews. It seems to me that if a user spends more time on Pogo than on Craigslist, then Pogo should be considered larger than Craigslist.

So, not only is time spent viewing a page a better metric for engagement, it’s also a better metric for determining which sites are larger than others IMHO.