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(InfoWorld) - Earlier this month the Business Software Alliance (BSA) upped the ante from $200,000 to $1 million for anyone who turns in a company that is illegally circumventing software licensing agreements.

BSA members include a who's who of the software and hardware industry, including Apple, Adobe, Dell, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and dozens more.

The bounty for uncovering cheaters is not just a marketing ploy. The Association can, in fact, put some bite into uncovering cheaters, according to Kris Barker, CEO of Express Metrix. Express Metrix is a company that does hardware and software auditing to help companies keep in compliance with their software licenses.

"Most software licensing agreements include a provision that allows a software vendor or its agent, which can be the BSA, to do an audit of end-user agreements," said Barker.

The BSA increased the reward as software piracy continues to grow. According to IDC, U.S. software vendors lost $7.3 billion in 2006 as a result of piracy.

However, turning in the man or woman in the cubicle next to you is not how an informer can earn the top reward. The BSA has 22 terms and conditions that must be met before the $1 million payoff is awarded.

The rewards are based on sums received in out-of-court settlements, which is the most common way a company avoids any more punitive prosecution for piracy.

In order to earn the $1 million, a company would have to settle out of court with the BSA for anywhere between $10,000,001 to $15,000,000.

The terms and conditions also state, that "no reward is payable unless the BSA pursues a case and, as a direct result of the information provided by you, receives a monetary payment from the reported organization."

A far more modest reward, up to $5,000, is given to anyone whose information leads to a settlement of $15,000 to $100,000.

Despite many restrictions, BSA says that since 2005, out-of-court settlements have totaled $22 million.

Another requirement of the terms and conditions states that an employee who has installed unlicensed software is not eligible for a reward unless "you were directed by your supervisor to do so."

The rewards are part of a larger BSA campaign, which is appropriately titled, "Blow the Whistle."

An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will "scrap rankings" based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax "increasingly make page views less meaningful." We've known for some time, but it's big news if a major stats service like Nielsen/NetRatings officially degrades the importance of page views. Note that later in the AP article, it states that Nielsen won't be fully scrapping page views - they "will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them".

The AP article details two cases where this change in focus will provide a noticeable change in bigco rankings:

"Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third."

You could argue that IM should be counted, as it's a place where advertisers can put their messages. So the 'AOL over Yahoo' case is justified in that respect. However, the Google case is less compelling. Its search engine is primarily built for efficiency and speed, so it seems unfair to judge them based on 'time spent on site'. Advertisers in that case are more interested in page views (or more precisely, relevancy).

How does this affect blogs?

Blogs are a good case where 'time spent' is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the 'quantity over quality' problem. It's easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the 'time spent on site' figures for those blogs and I think you'd find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn't. So in the case of blogs, I'd argue that 'time spent on site' is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

What Nielsen's Competitors Are Doing

The AP report states that Nielsen's rival, comScore Media Metrix, "addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour." But that doesn't take into account the effectiveness of a site, because again people could be visiting a site due to it being highly ranked in Google - yet when they click through they find rubbish content and so very quickly leave.

Compete (a R/WW sponsor) has a good measure called 'engagement', which measures things like Daily Attention and Average Stay. Alexa measures 'Page Views per user'. So things are beginning to change in the web stats industry.

Conclusion: One Small Step...

On balance I think it will be a step forward if Nielsen does indeed drop page views for 'time spent on site' in its rankings.

It's not yet a totally satisfying change, because with the likes of Google you want to somehow measure relevancy and with blogs you want to measure engagement. But it's at least a step away from page views, which have become too easily exploited - not just by some blogs, but also by the likes of Facebook and MySpace (which both make the user go through extra clicks to get to what they want). What do you think of this change by Nielsen?

For those of you who have been living under a rock, here is the ADO.NET team announcement of fresh bits of next generation data access stuff. To be honest I'm really glad that the team found another release vehicle. A lot of people I've been talking to lately made it very clear to me that they have lost hope and repeatedly tried to remind me of previous failures. Let's hope for the best!