According to the Press Release (PDF) issued on Tuesday, 10 July, 2007, Nielsen//NetRatings is going to begin using “Total Minutes” as the “best engagement metric” for Web 2.0 sites.

Since sites using Flash, AJAX, streaming media, and other rich internet applications (RIA) tend to have relatively few page views for a given length of visitor stay, this will have a net-negative effect on large traditional sites that do not have that RIA interface. For example, a typical visitor on Google spends 20 seconds per page, whereas a YouTube visitor spends more than twice as long per page on a typical visit (46 seconds).