Back in February, Compete compiled a list of what it said were the most "attention getting" websites on the Internet.  Today Compete has announced some new tools for their website - including the new "Attention" metric.

As I said back then, Compete is one of many companies trying to find a better way to gauge and rank websites.  Newer technologies are making some of the old staple metrics more and more obsolete.  Compete thinks it has found the answer with this new metric:

Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.

In addition to the new metric, Compete has also added the ability to track a site's performance on a daily basis, a new way to compare the growth of two sites, a "visits" counter that monitors how often people return to a site, and easily embeddable graphics.

Although it is by no means the definitive source of site performance and usage tracking, I've always liked Compete.  And I really like these new additions.

I'm not sure the Attention metric is going to revolutionize our industry any time soon.  But when you take into account that all things are relative (that is, comparing one site's Compete metric to another site's Compete metric), I can certainly see where the Attention metric could come into use.  In fact, the Compete blog post about the new metric includes a a comparison of Yahoo and Yelp using the attention metric.

And just for kicks, I threw together a quick comparison of attention for Google, Yahoo, and Live.com: