Announcing: The Compete Attention 200™
Written by TJ Mahony (contact - e-mail) -- February 5th, 2007 | Recommend ThisMore and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and planning their online media investments. Although unique visitors and page views are critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web – these metrics often fail to accurately measure engagement on sites using technologies such as online video and AJAX. Unfortunately, defining a universal “engagement metric” is like finding the holy grail – it’s elusive, controversial and many will die in an attempt to take ownership of it. So while we all are trying to crack the code on how to best measure engagement, Compete has created an important sister metric – Attention.
We are excited to announce the creation of the Attention 200™, the two hundred sites that yield the largest share of our attention on the web. The Attention Index is based on the amount of time U.S. internet users spend across the top one million websites. The Compete Attention 200™ represents the best of the best each month.
Attention is an incredibly powerful way to plan and measure the web because it is finite and we manage it selfishly. We grant our attention to people, activities and websites that merit receiving our most precious resource – our time.
Because it is grounded in consumers, tough to game and technology-agnostic, we feel it’s appropriate to begin incorporating Attention as a standard metric when analyzing the web. As such, we’ll be introducing additional views and Attention metrics into our SnapShot tool next month. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback!
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February 5th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
A meme begins: Compete announces the Attention 200 - Top Websites by time spent
I’ve been arguing that the old idea of pageviews is dead, and needs to be replaced a metric more akin to television: Attention. Namely, how long are people actually spending on your site. That led to a follow-up piece by Boston-based Compete, which ca…
February 5th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
This is very impressive and a great stat to have. When will you release more data for smaller websites, like my tiny blog?
Engagement and Attention (as you define, as time spent on a website) are two different measurement attributes.
Engagement factors in interest, interaction, willingness to tell others, and a bunch of others stuff that will be difficult if not impossible to measure.
Looking at both attention, engagement, and a bunch of other attributes will help us to tell ‘the story’ of what’s going on.
This is a step forward in our industry, thanks.
February 5th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
I have been following this blog since the Netflix vs. Blockbuster analysis came out. I realize similar data is available elsewhere, but it’s very powerful to see it published publicly. I hope everyone short on Netflix takes a look at their Attention Rank (#42) compares it to Blockbuster (#129). Who are you shorting now?
February 6th, 2007 at 12:32 am
This is valuable info - pageviews, unique visitors, and length of time are all vital factors - especially since AJAX is gaining popularity
February 6th, 2007 at 9:17 am
I would like to see the list long than the first 200.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Dave: We agree. Our intention is to allow you to obtain the Attention Rank for any website. We are building enhancements for SnapShot that will allow you to conduct this analysis independently. As you can imagine a list longer than 200 is not visually appealing.
It appears Seth Godin has picked up on the Attention Index and is arguing that it is another flawed metric. Seth’s position is, “Any website that attempts to improve time spent on every page (or pageviews for that matter) is just wasting time.” While Seth is right, he is missing the point. People don’t choose to spend time on bad websites. If people are frustrated and can’t find something worth their time they will simply leave - and thus stop spending time/granting their attention.
Seth hits on a good point though… We can not rely on a single metric. There are cases where spending time on a site could be considered a negative metric. Search for instance. A good Search solution will find you the best result, immediately, and get you off the site.
We have introduced Attention as a new piece of the puzzle and will continue to pursue new ways of measuring engagement. Enjoy.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I would have thought that websites with longer average visits per user would be ranked higher and those with shorter average visits per user would be ranked lower. This is not the case. For example, Match.com’s average user spends 13:32 minutes on their site (ranked #31), PlentyOfFish’s average user spends 15:44 minutes (ranked #73) and Manhunt.net’s users spend 33:08 minutes though the site is ranked down at #131. Should these websites not be ranked in the reverse order?
February 8th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Its a ranking of Visitors * time spent per month, not average session length.
I think this ranking is great, certainly more valuable then anything hitwise, comscore or others put out. I would really like to see compete come out with some of the things quantcast has, namely a questimate of visitors per day.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I don’t see how this can be relevent considereing the fact that there is entire Chinese internet that is not included into these metrics. And they surely get as big of a number of page views as some of the biggest sites on this list.
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Some site require time while others may be just hit and go like for examples (in order)
1. Google (or whatever searches)
2. Stumble
Content based websites like Blogs, Info, tech, etc. need eyeball time which has commercial exploitation potential of its own kind.
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I feel like the stats are not fully accurate.
A facebook user usually interacts with the site more than a myspace user as there is more to interact with on facebook.
Runescape is not very popular, but the sibling of a player, I can assure you, that interaction is VERY high. (Attention may be limited at times, but while watching TV, the game is played for hours at a time.)
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