Well, after a year of creating metrics to measure engagement on IBM's home page (and finding that it's hard to do and time spent on a site/page is not necessary a good measure of attention) Compete.com has released a new metric called the Compete Attention 200 Index.

But Attention and Engagement might not be exactly the same thing - or, at least, Attention and Engagement could be different stages of the same thing.

Interesting that The Compete Attention 200 index has  MySpace.com at the top, with 11.9% of all time spent on the top one million sites.

"…We are excited to announce the creation of the Attention 200™, the two hundred sites that yield the largest share of our attention on the web. The Attention Index is based on the amount of time U.S. internet users spend across the top one million websites. The Compete Attention 200™ represents the best of the best each month."

I suppose you can say that if I spent more time at Starbucks, on a monthly basis, that Starbucks has way more of my attention than, say, Subway's Sandwiches, where I spent hardly any time.

I'm just wondering if spending more time on a site really means I am putting more of my attention there.  By that measure, Sitemeter ought to be the site I'm paying the most attention to since I'm constantly looking at my blog stats.

Ok, I can see the value of this new metric for an advertiser and publisher (except I'd like to see a march larger index, like the top 5000 website for Attention on a monthly basis); outside of that, I'm not sure.  I'd rather have a metric that's made of more than one  measure (seems to me time spent on a site is a "two dimensional" metric when what we need are 3 dimensional metrics.

Also, the news of the updated "snapshot" tool from Compete.com is telling. I hope they give me an advance look at it. I can only guess what it's going to look like and include:

"…Because it is grounded in consumers, tough to game and technology-agnostic, we feel it’s appropriate to begin incorporating Attention as a standard metric when analyzing the web. As such, we’ll be introducing additional views and Attention metrics into our SnapShot tool next month. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback!"

What I'd really like is to be able to put "any" page of a website in the snapshot tool and get an "attention" reading out of it as a percentage of a site's "attention metric" and as a comparison against other related or competing sites.

I also like the measurement sensibilities that Compete.com has going into this new metrics (blows the socks off Hitwise!):

"…More and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and planning their online media investments. Although unique visitors and page views are critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web – these metrics often fail to accurately measure engagement on sites using technologies such as online video and AJAX. Unfortunately, defining a universal “engagement metric” is like finding the holy grail – it’s elusive, controversial and many will die in an attempt to take ownership of it. So while we all are trying to crack the code on how to best measure engagement, Compete has created an important sister metric – Attention."

I'm looking forward to seeing all of this really soon.