Time spent on our site

Several folks have asked me about the latest Neilsen report on time spent on newspaper.coms in January.  Pay it no mind.

Although it looks as if people spend a lot less time on our site per visit than on peer newspaper.coms, the discrepency is one that’s due to bad data collection, not lousy Web site design or uninteresting content etc.  Our internal numbers put us in January at 16:45, which represents a consistent, three-year rise in time spent, and is much more in line with our peer newspaper.coms.

So why isn’t that reflected in the Neilsen numbers?  It’s because of the way we architect our site and the way they collect the data.  We have many different domains:  Guide Live for entertainment, HSGT for high school sports, “beloblog” for our blogs, hosted.ap.org for nation/world news, neighborsgo for hyperlocal, etc., and when people navigate to one of those during a session with us… the clock stops.

We still actually have users looking at our content, but the Neilsen or comScore systems don't know that they're looking at our content, because the URLs have changed.