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Subject:	Re: UKNM: Re: Portals?
From:	Kevin Rice
Date:	Thu, 20 Aug 1998 17:55:46 +0100

At 12:03 20/08/98 +0100, Nick Gilbert (NewsNow) wrote:

>One can hypothesise 'til the cows come home about how long anyone stays on
>a portal site. The only answer to that question is to ask them. We used to
>have a counter on the homepage which would give us that information but
>since we've reverted to static pages, we don't get it any more. What it
>was telling us however was that our users spent an average of 40 minutes
>per day looking at the site, which as far as I'm concerned is about the
>same as the average person spends reading a magazine or newspaper. What's
>more the majority of our users return up to 5 days per week. Not bad for a
>"portal" site.

and then Phil Gyford wrote:

(a) I'm amazed many people would spend 40 minutes on any news site, let
alone it be an *average*. Did the counter just count how long the page was
in the browser? If so, then such a counter on Mr Showbiz would think I've
spent the entire morning reading their front page, as it's been sitting
there in the background for the past few hours.
--------------------------------------------------------

During the world cup I used the NewsNow sports pages for updates. I would
log on to NewsNow each and every morning and log out when I went home in
the evening (usually about 10hrs later). Working a six day week, and with
the world cup being on for a whole month I reckon I must have clocked up
about 270hrs!, but I tell you what, I can't have been physically looking at
the page for more than about 20mins a day. In other words 270hrs of
connected time equates to (in my case) about 9hrs of actual eyeballing.

Stats for the amount of time users spend *looking* at a site are IMHO
somewhat dubious. Experienced net users (in fact anyone who has discovered
the New Window button!) will frequently connect to a number of useful web
sites and simply leave them running in the background. This kind of
behaviour doesn't really happen with magazine/newspaper readers
(well.....not unless you fall asleep on the train!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kevin Rice
Connexity Limited - Internet training solutions

http://www.connexity.co.uk

kevin