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
I have this feeling. It's a small feeling. But I'm thinking that MySpace is like Geocities "back in the day". I'm 21 years old and at the age where drama significantly decreases and the real-world kicks in, otherwise known as the "post MySpace era". Once people move beyond their teen years, I think they will stop using MySpace. The majority of my friends have cut way back on "MySpace usage", some of them cancelling their account.
Will the younger pre-teen generation continue using MySpace after the original users are gone? That's the real question.
What's funny is that AOL could have captured this market a LONG time ago... I remember when people were creating AIM profiles via third-party services. I'm young enough to know that they were "all the rage". If AOL would have expanded into that area and allowed users to create profiles and link up, we wouldn't be discussing this blog entry right now ;-)
Posted by: Robert Dewey | July 11, 2006 at 03:11 PM
The thing about all this though, is that MySpace is not all that great of a site. Most people I know in school still, myself included, are all about Facebook. The facebook technology is far superior. It is quicker, more versatile, better layout, and the clincher, YOU CAN TAG YOUR PHOTOS. MySpace is just a little lame. Kind of reminds me of Friendster before a friend of mine upped me on MySpace. Now friendster is an also ran.
Posted by: KALEB | July 11, 2006 at 05:28 PM
Curious comments by Robert and Kaleb. Jeff, I have heard nothing to the effect that MySpace is cracking any code on monetizing community sites. You can't make any "bargain" comments until there are some credible financial numbers out. They certainly will need to improve their offering as kids grow up. I have also heard that facebook is holding onto some post college kids but in an unfriendly walled garden way.
Posted by: Narendra | July 11, 2006 at 05:37 PM
I find all the "there's no way it can last" and "myspace is actually a pretty ugly site" and "social networking site XYZ is way better" pretty funny.
I don't have a horse in this race; I don't particularly care who wins in social marketing. And I don't know if MySpace is going to continue to grow or start to decline.
It just seems that now people really really want it to fail, want it to lose, want it to succumb.
One factor on their side: something that grows this fast is growing because of viral and WOM promotion. Sometimes the funnel can flip, and it can melt away just as fast.
Posted by: John Koetsier | July 11, 2006 at 09:31 PM
Wow, thanks Jeff for letting us know about MySpace having become N.1 worldwide. I´d just like to answer Kaleb about FaceBook: I agree, it´s a fantastic socializing website. The point is that if you don´t have a .edu address, you cannot register on FaceBook, which restricts a lot the population of users!
Posted by: Jeremy Fain | July 13, 2006 at 03:33 AM
I agree with Narendra but you can't deny it's getting bigger and bigger. There will come new folks when older leave MySpace. It's what the people want. I know the Site isnt perfekt at all and there are enough alternatives but it's the way things go. MySpace is hype and when we all keep talking this way it's only getting bigger.
Posted by: rxbbx | July 13, 2006 at 10:10 AM
I work at Compete and we felt our data would be useful in clearing up the confusion over this size controversy.
Compete's analysis (which can be found on our blog) indicates Yahoo dominates MySpace in-terms of visitors (advanage 64M and change), but that MySpace surpassed Yahoo in January in terms of page views (advantage 15B).
See the blog for trended graphics.
http://blog.compete.com
Thanks.
Posted by: TJ | July 14, 2006 at 09:46 AM
I am a huge fan of myspace I use it everyday to keep myself connected to my friends, and my network.
Posted by: Tom Truong | August 11, 2006 at 10:26 PM