Wednesday July 12, 1:07 PM
UPDATE 1-MySpace top single U.S. Web site--Hitwise
NEW YORK, July 11 (Reuters) - Online hangout MySpace.com
has overtaken Yahoo Inc.'s e-mail gateway as the single
most-visited U.S. Web site, although Yahoo's network of sites
retains a broader audience, according to a report issued on
Tuesday.
According to Internet traffic measurement firm Hitwise,
News Corp.'s MySpace.com accounted for 4.46 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.
However, Yahoo's top three destinations -- Yahoo Mail, the
Yahoo.com home page and Yahoo search -- collectively attracted
more than 10 percent of the total U.S. audience, according to
Hitwise data.
MySpace's home page and e-mail site only amounted to 7.3
percent of U.S. Web visits, according to Hitwise's list of top
10 U.S. Internet properties for the first full week of July.
Yahoo issued a statement saying that: "The Yahoo network is
made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare
MySpace.com to just Yahoo's (e-mail site)."
In the United States, Yahoo said it attracts 129 million
unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the
online population in the world's biggest Internet market. By
contrast, MySpace reaches only 30 percent of the online
audience, with 52 million unique visitors, according to Yahoo.
Hitwise does not provide figures for the number of unique
visitors to a site.
Yahoo also said it has a larger share of online time spent
than any other property -- a key measure for advertisers. It
said it accounts for 13 percent of users' online time, while
MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users' online time.
U.S. only statistics also understate the far greater
international audience Yahoo has than MySpace, which only
recently has been seeking to expand outside of the United
States.
ComScore Networks, a rival to Hitwise in the Internet
measurement field, projects that Yahoo attracts more than 500
million unique monthly visitors to its network of sites on a
global basis, making Yahoo the most visited Internet network.
With its own category, MySpace, which dominates social
networking on the Web, gained U.S. market share in June from
other sites that aim to create virtual communities online for
sharing music, photos or other interests, Hitwise said.
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, or one-tenth the traffic.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million
one year ago as part of a strategy to rapidly build up the
media conglomerate's Internet presence.
(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)
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