MySpace; More Popular Than Google and Yahoo

MySpace has knocked e-mail giant Yahoo out of the No. 1 ranking for most page views, as tabulated by top Internet tracker Hitwise.

MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., garnered 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the first week in July 2006, for the first time earning the No. 1 spot on the hit list for its homepage. MySpace topped Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Hitwise tracks the Internet page hits by 10 million U.S. users on 500,000 Web sites according to U.S. research general manager Bill Tancer. MySpace's Hitwise ranking as top hit-getter is based on total page views, not unique user views.

In the past year, MySpace has grown from collecting 1.9 percent of page visits to nearly 4.5 percent by July 8. That's a 132 percent increase , and a 4,300 percent increase in visits over two years.

"A lot of what's happening is that people are building spaces inside MySpace," Tancer said. "A lot of what's changing online is that people are going from viewing content online to building their own content."

Among social-networking sites, MySpace accounted for nearly 80 percent of visits last month. Facebook and Xanga accounted for 7.5 and 3.8 percent, respectively.

Tancer said the Internet right now is in an "active state of hyper-innovation," allowing for rapid changes in what's popular.

Tancer said he's not counting on the current top page-view rank holders to stay stagnant for long, noting that "any company can come in with a better product and leapfrog the incumbent."

While MySpace may be popular with its young user base, it has been getting increasing pressure from the government, parents and advocacy groups over the vulnerability of its users to child predators. MySpace has taken steps to ensure that its users are safe online, but many feel that the company's efforts just aren't enough. MySpace's most recent troubles revolve around a $ 30 million lawsuit brought forth by a mother who claims that her 14-year old daughter was abducted and sexually assaulted by someone she met on the social networking site.

Not surprisingly, some websites are taking issue with the recently released figures. Yahoo! is crying foul because it says that Hitwise ranks its domains which include search, news, and e-mail as separate entities. "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," said the company in a news release.