Nielsen Abandons Page Views

There’s been talk about the irrelevance of the page view for quite a while now, so when Nielsen/NetRatings officially changed their default ranking metric from ‘page views’ to ‘time spent’ today, it wasn’t much of a surprise.

Whatever one thinks about time spent as a true metric of the quality of the web user experience, the move away from page views clearly favors social media-oriented sites.

We built KickApps to empower publishers to drive audience engagement in all its forms, and at the very least, we’re glad to see one of the industry’s major metrics shops trying to assign a more nuanced value to that. In this sense, the move represents a shift in the mainstream market, and we look forward to following it as it’s debated in the business and tech communities going forward.

Social Networking & Video Becoming Dominant Online Activities

These days, a report claiming the rapid growth of Social Networking and video may not seem like news at all. It may, as TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley asserts, even seem quite obvious.

But the numbers in a recent study conducted by the folks at Ipsos Insight are still pretty staggering, revealing enormous growth potential on an international scale.

The report indicates that one in five of all adults worldwide have visited a Social Networking site, with an equal percentage (20%) of regular Internet users visiting those sites in the past 30 days. In the US, that number was 24%, coming in behind Mexico, China, Brazil, and most notably, South Korea, where 55% of online adults had visted a Social Networking site in the past month.

Long a bellwether for worldwide tech trends, I think it’s safe to say that South Korea is a good indicator of where we’re all headed. As Mediapost confirms in its own analysis of the report, Social Networking is quickly becoming the ‘dominant online behavior globally.’

The study also says that online music has stopped growing, and that online video activities are becoming “the driving force in the next stage of digital media’s growth.”

Since we built KickApps to make it easy for anyone to integrate social networking and video functionality into their website, we’re glad to see more third-party proof of the world’s increasing appetite for both…even if we already kind of knew it.

SonyPSPInfo Adds Community

SonyPSPInfo, the award winning site about Everything you need for your Sony PlayStation Portable… and more!, launched its community last month. The site’s a really nice implementation of the KickApps platform using our free model. Keep in mind that publishers can get up and running in no time using the entire KickApps platform (user-generated video, social networking, premium video and syndication using Widgets) at no cost. So, all you PSP gamers out there, join up, fill out your profile, upload a photo of yourself and start interacting with your fellow PSP’ers.

More CSS Changes

Update: We’ve revised the launch date to Tuesday, July 17 to accomodate requests from some of our affiliates.

We’ve planned some additional changes to your KickApps-powered pages to provide even more flexibility for CSS customizations. The new changes and a new Transition Kit are provided in the CSS Update Tutorial on KickDeveloper. Since you may need some more time to review and plan for these updates, we’ve moved the release 2.2 launch date to Thursday, July 12 Tuesday, July 17.

If you’ve implemented any custom CSS on your KickApps-powered pages, read the updated CSS Update Tutorial before July 12 before July 17.

We’re excited about some of the new features the release will include – look for a detailed announcement on the 12th17th.

Chestnut Dethrones Kobayashi, 66 – 63

Legendary professional eater Takeru Kobayashi was defeated by Joey Chestnut in the Nathan’s Annual Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest today. Chestnut ate 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes, shattering his previous world record of 59.5. Kobayashi only ate 63.

This is exciting news not only for members of the KickApps-powered Major League Eating (MLE) community, but to fans of international sport everywhere.

Chestnut, who is described on the MLE website as being known for his “simple, levelheaded approach to the sport,” consumed more than 12,540 calories during the course of the contest, according to ESPN.

Here’s the math on that:

Hot Dogs Eaten by Chestnut: 66
Calories in Average Hot Dog: 110
Calories in Average Bun: 80
Calories consumed by Chestnut in contest: 12,540

For more information, visit Major League Eating.