The MySpace website deemed a virtual clubhouse where teenagers bare details of their lives has eclipsed internet oldster Yahoo! as the most popular website in the United States, a research firm said on Tuesday.
Yahoo! rejected the claim as “misleading” because it ranked the search engine’s domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.
MySpace.com got more online visitors than the Yahoo! or Yahoo! Mail websites last week, according to Hitwise, an online intelligence service based in New York City.
Yahoo! said it wasn’t accurate to compare MySpace traffic to that at one of the separate internet doors used to reach the Sunnyvale, California, company’s services.
“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,” the company said in a release.
Yahoo! calculated that it attracted 129-million unique visitors in the United States monthly while MySpace drew fewer.
Yahoo! contended it was the world’s most trafficked internet destination, with 500-million visitors monthly.
MySpace eked out a victory over Yahoo! by getting 4,46% of the total US internet traffic as compared to Yahoo! Mail’s 4,42% for the week ending on July 8, Hitwise reported.
MySpace also has an e-mail site that was ranked separately by Hitwise.
MySpace dominated when compared to other social networking sites, accounting for 79,97% of online visits as compared to the 7,58% of the traffic that went to second-place Facebook, according to Hitwise.
“MySpace continues its meteoric rise, to now claim the number one spot for all internet visits in the United States,” Bill Tancer, general manager of Global Research at Hitwise, said in a release.
“The fact that MySpace was virtually unknown by the mainstream internet users two years ago and now claims the top position, demonstrates how hyper-competitive the internet really is.”
The popularity of Los Angeles-based MySpace has exploded since it was launched online in January of 2004. It became a popular place for teenagers to share journals, photographs, poems, dreams and intimate details of their lives online.
MySpace requires members to be at least 14 years old, and revokes memberships if it is obvious from the content of postings that a child has lied about being old enough, according to the company.
Concerns that the website was an easy hunting ground for child predators prompted MySpace to strengthen safeguards last month.
Most MySpace users were in English-speaking territories, but the company said it intended to launch “international MySpaces” in different languages.
MySpace was bought last year by News Corporation and is a unit of Fox Interactive Media in Los Angeles. – AFP