The company, one of the touchstones for measuring online audiences, will today announce that it will place more emphasis on the time spent on web pages and the number of sessions.
Nielsen/NetRatings said this is largely due to the rise in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML as a popular web development method.
Ajax allows web applications to be built that rarely need pages to change or be refreshed, which reduces the number of page views regardless of how long a user spends with an application.
The company said that in some categories, such as search engines, the ratio of page views to minutes spent is roughly the same between competitors.
But comparing sites from two categories, such as a video site versus a social networking site, reveals that more minutes are spent on YouTube pages while MySpace gets more page views.
Nielsen/NetRatings said that in May, AOL ranked highest for minutes viewed, with 25 billion. Yahoo came second with 19.6 billion, while Microsoft (MSN/Live), Fox (MySpace), and Google accumulated 10.6 billion, 7.8 billion and 7.4 billion respectively.
