Hitwise claims MySpace has overtaken Yahoo! in USA

Hitwise claims MySpace has overtaken Yahoo! in USA

Amazon’s Alexa might be showing MySpace.com as the third most visited website in the USA for now, the Internet tracking firm Hitwise has claimed that the social networking website has now overtaken Yahoo! and Google as the most visited domain last week.

As per their latest statistics, MySpace is now more popular than both Yahoo! Mail and Google search engine service.

In fact, MySpace.com accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending July 8. This helped them to overtake the internet giants for the first time. Hitwise however did not reveal the number of visits they websites get during that period.

The News Corp. owned online social networking site also managed to snatch away market share for competing projects. MySpace captured nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking sites in this period. This is an impressive improvement from 76 percent in April.

Facebook was the second most popular social networking project in the US with just around 7.6 percent market share.

Update

Yahoo! Statement on this news report:

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)