Nielsen//NetRatings has said it will place greater emphasis on how long users spend on a site and give less credence to the almighty page view as technology has signaled a shift in the way people engage with websites.

The internet media and market research firm announced today that it added both "Total Minutes" and "Total Sessions" metrics to NetView, its syndicated internet audience measurement service.

According to Nielsen, the emergence of online video and pages that refresh regularly has made page views a less significant measure of a website as compared to time spent interacting with the content.

"Based on everything that's going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen told The Wall Street Journal. "We're changing our stance on how the data should be used."

The new metric changes the online landscape somewhat, giving a boost to AOL, which ranks first with 25 billion minutes spent on its pages in May. The metric includes AOL's popular instant messenger. Yahoo! came in second with 20 billion minutes spent on its pages in May, while Google tumbled to the No. 5 spot in terms of minutes spent online, even though the search giant is third in terms of page views.