Great, Nielsen decides page views are dead. I wrote about my lack of faith in page views almost a year ago, and my opinion is still quite similar.

But, why would Nielsen replace page views with the “time spent” metric? When everyone focused on page views, it rewarded companies like Myspace for requiring clicking through 10 pages just to update your profile. Now, if time spent becomes the new default metric, then sites like Myspace will be rewarded for their slow, cumbersome interfaces that needlessly waste your time. Whereas, a site like Google would be punished for having a speedy, easy interface that prioritizes getting you where you want to go, not keeping you on Google’s site.

And what about tabbed browsers? On average I keep 12 sites open for most of the day. I rarely look at any of them, I just keep my tabs open, so I don’t lose anything I might want to return to. All these tabs would see significant and unjustified boosts under the time spent metric.

Page views and time spent are really just proxies for measuring engagement. Very bad proxies, to be specific. For blogs FeedBurner’s “Reach” metric is better than anything else I know, but it’s still not great, and it places too much emphasis on RSS readers’ engagement over regular site visitors. Plus, “Reach” doesn’t really work for non-blog properties at all. A company with a novel and accurate proxy for engagement could be very valuable in this market. Let me know if you think you have something exciting.

I understand the importance of quantitative measurements, but I think that internet analysts put far too much emphasis on only quantitative metrics. I’d love to see heavy competition over experimentally sound qualitative metrics. What is the “Alexa” of qualitative data? Perhaps review sites like TechCrunch and Mashable qualify as qualitative analysis, but they are FAR from experimentally sound points of data, both editors openly admit their biases.

I wish a renowned UI consulting agency, like Creative Good or adaptive path, would release regular user experience and usability studies on the top 100 web properties. I might even pay for such analysis, especially if it stretched out on the long tail for ad hoc requests.

But, until such a service exists, I’m stuck with quantitative metrics. I’m glad to see the page view go the way of the Dodo, but time spent is ridiculous replacement. But until I find a better proxy for engagement, I’ll be chanting: “Page Views are Dead. Long Live Page Views.”