The internet research firm has taken what it considers the three key metrics of engagement - time, pages and visits per person, as opposed to simply pages per person - to demonstrate what an alternative league table of the top 500 most engaging online brands by UK audience might look like.
Averaging out the ranking of the 500 most popular online brands in February this year by these three separate metrics, social networking site Facebook emerges as the highest ranked, with 2.7, followed by eBay and another social network, Bebo, both at 5.3.
Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//Netratings, said: "Facebook is third on visits per person, first by pages per person and fourth by time per person, giving it an average 2.7 engagement ranking and beating eBay, which also performs well across all five categories."
Runescape and Google follow, with Yahoo!, Fox Interactive (MySpace), MSN/Windows Live, Electronic Arts Online and Faceparty finishing in the top 10.
Measuring by pages per person, the traditional metric of engagement, Facebook, Bebo and eBay, still come out as the top three, but in a slightly different order.
Facebook appears as the number one overall engaging site and Bebo number three, yet Facebook trails Bebo in total page views by more than half the amount.
Burmaster said: "In the current internet mash-up, it's not enough to measure just one metric - you need to measure two, three or four different metrics to come to a reasonable understanding of the value of advertising on that site and to better define engagement.
"Advertisers need to ask whether to hit the largest number of users or go for a site that has a good ranking on more than one metric"
Other criteria include "stickiness" - sessions per person - which has Google, MSN/Windows Live and Facebook at the top, and most popular in terms of unique audience, which is led by Google, MSN/Windows Live and Yahoo!.
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