MySpace.com Number 1 of all Internet Sites
Yahoo Inc’s email gateway has now been overtaken as the most viewed U.S. website by MySpace.com.
HitWise.com issued a report on Tuesday that stated that News Corp’s MySpace.com accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visit for the week ending 8th July 2006. This is the first time that the site has surpassed the traffic figures of Yahoo mail, Yahoo, Google and MSN’s hotmail homepages.
In response to this report Yahoo have issued a statement: "The Yahoo network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo's (e-mail site)."
Yahoo have also said that it attracts 129 million unique visitors per month which represents 74 percent of the online population in the worlds biggest internet market. According to Yahoo this is in contrast to MySpace which reaches only 30 percent of the online audience, with 52 million unique visitors.
In the blog, Bill Trancer of Hitwise stated: “To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.”
But, will this last?
Seems online destination MySpace has beat Yahoo and Google in visits. That may end soon, thanks to a proposed federal law that would ban surfing MySpace and other social-networking sites like Friendster and LiveJournal at most schools and libraries.
And if you know kids, who are the sites' most ardent users, that's where they do most of TheirSpacing. Shoot, if we had Wikipedia, we wouldn't have listened on about mitochondria and Shakespeare, either.
In a post-DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) world, where would kids network? Would they be forced to -- ick -- talk face-to-face?
Comments
Come on everyone... it's a transparent PR ploy...
EVERYONE's focused on the headline - "MySpace surpasses Yahoo! and Google" - but that's not what happened at all. Take a second to actually READ the news story;
"...displacing Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s top-rated e-mail gateway and Google Inc.'s search site, Internet tracking firm Hitwise said on Tuesday.
News Corp.'s MySpace accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending July 8, pushing it past Yahoo Mail for the first time and outpacing the home pages for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail.
So, what do we know?
- HitWise (not exactly a highly-regarded authority like comScore) won't actually release their numbers, nor will they disclose their methodology
- HitWise says (and you just have to trust them on this...) that MySpace traffic surpassed Yahoo! Mail. Big whoop. Didn't surpass Yahoo! overall though.
- HitWise further says MySpace surpassed the home pages for Yahoo!/Google/MSN - but not their entire portals, and all their associated properties, sites and pages.
Not to take a thing away from MySpace's legitimate success, but this is clearly a PR ploy either on the part of MySpace, or HitWise, or both.
Posted by: Thom Kozik | July 16, 2006 10:49 AM