Weighing MySpace.com & Yahoo Popularity
Yesterday Hitwise sent out a press release stating that MySpace.com was the most popular site on the Internet during the first week of July. More popular than Yahoo Mail and more popular than Google.
The Hitwise statement and numbers which back it up have caused some questioning by some, including Yahoo, of the practices of Hitwise and its metrics, along with the news channels which have covered the MySpace study.
The simplest way to sum up the Hitwise statement is that the domain, the page, MySpace.com, was the most visited single page last week. And that page experienced more visits than Yahoo Mail, or mail.yahoo.com, last week. Previously, according to Hitwise tracking, mail.yahoo.com was the most visited single domain page online.
MySpace.com is not more popular or visited than Yahoo. Hands down, Yahoo is the most popular property online, and they’ve sent out the numbers to prove it.
The report that Hitwise released yesterday 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.
Add source: comScore Media Metrix, June 2006
So, yes, we did not try to be misleading by reporting that MySpace.com was more popular than Yahoo in yesterday’s post MySpace.com Most Popular Site in America;
“In a sign of the times, MySpace.com has overtaken Yahoo Mail and Google Search as the most visited web site (page) last week. Hitwise, the web traffic and behavior tracking people, say that MySpace attracted 4.46% of all US visits, which pushed Yahoo Mail down to 2nd place and tops all other web portals.”
Despite the difference in being the most popular site online and the most visited single domain online, it is hard to question the rapid growing popularity of MySpace. Here is a figure from HitWise:
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.
