Reuters just relayed that, according to Internet tracking firm Hitwise, MySpace has surpassed Yahoo as the number one Internet property in the US. The piece does not indicate which metric is being used (unique visitors, number of visits, number of page views, etc) but it might be visits. Hopefully Hitwise will has released that analysis on their (very informative) blog: MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites. The chart below shows the growth of MySpace’s market share against Google. It would have been nice to have Yahoo’s plotted as well.
A few interesting data points:
- MySpace accounted for 4.45 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.
- 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 4.45% of all U.S. 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.
- MySpace captured nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking sites, up from 76 percent in April. A distant second was FaceBook at 7.6 percent.
- Of the top 20 search terms driving traffic to Internet sites – over the past 4 weeks, 5 were related to MySpace (myspace, myspace.com, www.myspace.com, my space, myspace layouts) representing in aggregate 1.85% of all searches (and that’s just looking at these five keywords).
This makes NewsCorp's $580M buy of Intermix Media increasingly look like a bargain – especially as FIM improves the monetization of that massive audience and traffic.
Just so happens that Fred Wilson also featured the Comscore Mediametrix June numbers regarding top social networking sites. Per the aforementioned statistics, MySpace dwarfs other networks both in terms of actual audience and growth.
Update: I am late (very) late at publishing this, but Yahoo got very angry at the allegation made by Hitwise, and Tim Smith from Outcast PR reached out to bloggers with the following statement:
The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month.
In the U.S. alone, Yahoo! attracts 129 million unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the online population; in comparison, MySpace reaches only 30 percent of the online population with an audience of 52 million unique visitors. In addition, Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time.
Yahoo! maintains its leadership position as the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online, with a community of more than 500 million unique monthly visitors from around the globe.
(These statistics are according to comScore Media Metrix, June 2006)
I thought I would ask my friend LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise what they thought of the reaction, and Hitwise's public statement was:
Hitwise ranks over 500,000 websites on a daily basis, including individual sites as well as the domains and sub-domains of larger websites. The press release issued yesterday included the top-10 domains and at no time did we represent all MySpace properties compared to all Yahoo! properties. The table included in the press release listed the rank order of the individual domains and sub-domains as reported from our data.
Net net: Hitwise seems to have compared apples and oranges when publishing their report, and we (I) have not investigated quite enough before relaying the information.
Tags: myspace
Tags: myspace
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