This is what Jakob Nielsen writes in his last Alertbox, "Homepage Real Estate Allocation." Of course, he wants to sell his book and consulting time, but his claims are based on somewhat ridiculous assertions.
Corporate homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world. Space on a big company's homepage is worth about 1,300 times as much as land in the business districts of Tokyo.
How does he justify this? He doesn't.
A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that's inside the site. However, these two goals accounted for only 39% of the screen space across a sample of 50 homepages.
So his claims are based on a survey of only 50 -- unnamed -- homepages. This is simply ridiculous.
The following list show the average percentage of pixels used for different categories across the sample of the 50 homepages surveyed.
- Operating system and browser overhead: 19%
- Navigation: 20%
- Content of interest to users: 20%
- Advertisements: 2%
- Self-promotions (ads for the site's own stuff): 9%
- Welcome, logo, tagline, and other site identifications: 5%
- Filler (useless stock art, such as "smiling ladies"): 5%
- Unused: 20%
If navigation elements and contents are the only useful categories, this means that 60% of all pixels in homepages are wasted. But Nielsen has the solution: purchase his last book, "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed."
Will you buy it? I will not.
Source: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, February 10, 2003
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