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July 11, 2006

MySpace hit #1 US destination last week, Hitwise

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Hitwise is reporting that MySpace was the website most visited by US internet users last week. This is the first time that’s happened, the company reports. Yahoo and Google traditionally lead the pack, but Hitwise’s Bill Tancer points out today that MySpace attained a market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits for the week ending July 8, 2006. Though traffic stats are always hard to determine, Hitwise is establishing itself as one of the most authoritative voices on the subject.

Recent numbers for MySpace put the service at 75 million plus users, 15 million daily unique logins, 240,000 new users per day, and nearly 30 billion monthly page views - that’s 10,593 page views per second.

Perhaps what this means is that for many young people, the social web isn’t a seperate place it’s the web. Once MySpace teams with a powerful search engine, goes multilingual (if that works) and continues expanding into new verticals like the new Books section - then we’ll see if building on the basic social functions the site is famous for will make it stronger. Child safety issues, malware - so much remains to be seen.

Update: Yahoo! has issued a statement in response to the Hitwise data emphasizing that only Yahoo! Mail is included in these numbers. If all of the Yahoo! domains are included then the company remains in the lead. I can’t help but wonder whether the picture would change again if all the News Corporation domains beyond MySpace were included!

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 11:10 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Aidan Henry

    July 11th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    Congrats to MySpace.

    Although I’m not convinced that the ‘quality’ and value of the MySpace user is equal to that of a Yahoo/Google user. Search engines command a much better ROI on user acquisition than do social networks.

    MySpace will always be the new GeoCities in my heart - a playground of flashing text and tiled backgrounds.

  2. digifad

    July 11th, 2006 at 11:56 am

    Now when are they going to clean up their code.

  3. Drew Olanoff

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    I keep hearing this trashing of MySpace’s features and its lackluster code. Hey People, 90 million people interact with this site and its system. I like their quick and dirty approach, and for what MySpace does, it’s pretty impressive if you take a step back and look at it.

  4. jonnyd

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    @Drew: Yeah, it is impressive, but I really wish I could get some RSS feeds from the blogs, or even just a standard interface that, say, flock could deal with.

  5. Don Wilson

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    Very nice.

    Stop trying to put Web 2.0 stuff into MySpace, jonnyd. It wont work :)

  6. digifad

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

    No one is downplaying the usefulness of the site and impressive stats. But the site and its code can be improved to provide an even more user-driven and enjoyable site.

  7. Paul

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:26 pm

    How about MySpace cleans up their code, and donates the millions saved from bandwidth savings to charity?

  8. pacificdave

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    “Stop trying to put Web 2.0 stuff into MySpace”

    maybe i’m missing something but why?

  9. Don Wilson

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:58 pm

    Paul, why?

    pacificdave, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. :) Because you fill your life with Web 2.0 stuff doesn’t mean 90 million myspace users do, and introducing technology like rss and others could be overwhelming.

  10. Jafar

    July 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    Lol, donate savings to charity. Do you realize who _owns_ myspace?

  11. Chris

    July 11th, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    @Aiden Henry

    I thought the same thing about correlating Geocities and Myspace. It is webpage creation for beginners. Its popular because they don’t have to dive head deep into HTML to create their own webpage.

  12. Jason Coleman

    July 11th, 2006 at 1:20 pm

    I just added a MySpace profile last week. QED, I must be the cause of all the new traffic at MySpace.

    BTW, you can get to my profile by going to http://jason.needsfriends.com/ thanks to http://urlDoctor.com. I’m in no way affiliated with that service, I just think it rocks.

  13. Malcolm

    July 11th, 2006 at 1:38 pm

    I know there will be a day when myspace2.0 comes around. It’s inevitable, probaly more along the lines of useless junk people can do on the site like realtime friend interactions through the site rather than anything like rss.

  14. Drew Olanoff

    July 11th, 2006 at 2:12 pm

    I am not downplaying or ignoring “web 2.0″ gadgets, but come on. TechCrunch covers so many “2.0 startups”, how many actually get used by MAINSTREAM people. MySpace works, plain and simple. Moms use it, uncles use it, kids use it. Find me a tool that TechCrunch features that can say the same thing. I agree with the “if it ain’t broke dont fix it” comment.

  15. A.H

    July 11th, 2006 at 2:13 pm

    Only shows you that those who called MySpace a “fad” will soon start calling it “business”.

    Allen.H

  16. Nick Pang | Wii Preorder

    July 11th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    will this become a wall community by itself, like AOL, who is currently breaking out that mold? MySpace is a mini-WWW by itself - AMAZING!

  17. Josh

    July 11th, 2006 at 2:26 pm

    Congrats to the folks (ok, now they are a giant corp) at MySpace. They certainly are proving the doubters wrong. I guess 90 million users can’t be (All) wrong

  18. grant

    July 11th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    I have tons of friends on myspace and I spent multiple session up from 30 min to 2 hours on myspace daily, it’s really addictive. It’s actually easier to meet people than any other dating site, based on my experience.

  19. Motumbo

    July 11th, 2006 at 3:42 pm

    Alexa’s numbers seems pretty different to me (5-1)…

  20. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 11th, 2006 at 3:48 pm

    Motumbo, I believe it. General consensus lately appears to be that Hitwise is far more accurate than Alexa. Search around this site or the web in general and you’ll see there are many people who believe that there are some big problems with Alexa numbers.

  21. Markus

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

    Actually that means myspace is doing around 30,000 pageviews a second during peak. That is just pain NUTS!

  22. Mark Devlin

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:34 pm

    I am pretty sure that most of the page views on MySpace are from the internal mail system. Most MySpace users are using it as a mail client and address book combined.

  23. Steve

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    For many people this is not just another part of the web, it is the central element of their internet experience. Myspace cannot (yet) be truly thrown in with Web 2.0 technologies (no RSS for example) but it has certainly created social networks where a couple of years ago none were anticipated.
    It is true that overwhelming Myspace with Web 2.0 technologies could just turn people off, and there is an enormous amount of Web 2.0 technologies reported by techcrunch that seem to do very similar things. Remember however that we are at the beginning of using these technologies, and the market and philosophy (where are we going with this and why?) will mature with time.

  24. Renato Shriakashi

    July 11th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

    Myspace is amazing. “It just works” as someone said above. And thats is the most important thing, above all technologies features.

    Steve, I dont aggry with you when you say: “Myspace cannot (yet) be truly thrown in with Web 2.0″. Myspace is PURELY Web 2.0, and its not quite rellated with Technologies they use. New technologies help applications to become 2.0, they are not the Web 2.0

    There is a social phenomenon that makes MySpace what it is today. The same thing happens with Orkut in Brazil and all others good Virtual Communities over the Web. That is no coincidence. Its definitely NOT a “geocities”. Its value is in relationships, not in profiles.

  25. BlogReader

    July 11th, 2006 at 7:10 pm

    90M users? I don’t buy it. There’s 70M people in the US between 15 and 34. Are there 20M creapy old men or MSNBC sting operators looking at the site?

  26. Don Wilson

    July 11th, 2006 at 9:29 pm

    BlogReader, surprisingly enough, people above 30 use the internet, not just us whipper snappers.

  27. DrewB

    July 12th, 2006 at 1:55 am

    I am not trying to downplay MySpace’s popularity (it is obviously HUGE), but don’t you think their first week of July market share is more a reflection of kids being out of school for the summer than any substantial growth in viewership?

  28. Dave Verwer

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:19 am

    > 90M users? I don’t buy it. There’s 70M people in
    > the US between 15 and 34. Are there 20M creapy
    > old men or MSNBC sting operators looking at the site?

    AFAIK while the traffic talked about here was from the US only, the number of users is worldwide, hard as it is for americans to believe but other countries do exist :)

  29. tmonkey66

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:22 am

    > 90M users? I don’t buy it. There’s 70M people in
    > the US between 15 and 34. Are there 20M creapy
    > old men or MSNBC sting operators looking at the site?

    I’m 40 and avoided myspace as too crass and amateurish. I finally gave in a couple of weeks ago and am amazed how many 30+ year olds I know are on it and use it daily. Kind of scary, but as several have said it works at what it does, and with a bit of playing around with some css can be made to look kinda OK.

  30. Don Wilson

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:43 am

    “I am not trying to downplay MySpace’s popularity (it is obviously HUGE), but don’t you think their first week of July market share is more a reflection of kids being out of school for the summer than any substantial growth in viewership?”

    I do work in the humor industry of the internet and the summer is the worst time for our viewers, September, right after school starts, is the best time for us.

  31. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 8:28 am

    Post updated with response from Yahoo!

  32. Don Wilson

    July 12th, 2006 at 10:42 am

    Yahoo is a network, MySpace is a limited entity. Hitwise is suggesting that Yahoo as a whole is behind MySpace, but like Yahoo said, they’re only counting a portion of their whole network (if this is true).

    If what Yahoo suggests is true then that’s a fairly substantial “mistake” on Hitwise’s part.

  33. Shandalar

    July 12th, 2006 at 2:51 pm

    So does Hitwise count all of Google’s pages or just part of it? Like, does it count the hits for the translator or some of the more specialized searches (e.g. Google Scholar…) or just the stuff you can look up from the homepage?

    Because if Hitwise has all of Google’s hits and all of MySpaces, and only one part of Yahoo!, imagine how far in the lead the Yahoo! network must be.

  34. Intergalactic Hussy

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:14 pm

    And to think, I would have had no idea about the popularity of myspace without the oh so wonderful Hitwise. :P

  35. Jay

    July 14th, 2006 at 5:30 pm

    I work at Compete and we felt our data would be useful in clearing up the MySpace vs Yahoo confusion regarding which is bigger.

    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.

    blog.compete.com

    Thanks.

  36. Drama Queen

    October 19th, 2006 at 8:02 am

    Wow! I’m amazed everyday by technology! I got into the whole myspace thing a few months ago and I can’t get enough of it. Something really cool I found on there the other day is really worth checking out. Have you ever heard of urban storytelling? There’s this group in NYC called the Moth, and they put on storytelling events there. Right now, they’ve teamed up with the TV network TNT (we know drama) for some reason, and are doing a contest on Myspace called “What’s Your Story?”. Basically, you submit a video of yourself telling the story of the most risky thing you’ve ever done, and you can win a trip to New York and other cool stuff. It’s actually really interesting and I strongly suggest everyone check it out: http://www.myspace.com/mothstories . They show a few videos on the myspace page that are worth watching if you’re confused by what they do… It will be interesting to see the different video submissions of people telling their risky stories. I think it’s really cool that myspace provides such a platform to be in the know about these types of things.

  37. The Web Conferencing Blog

    December 15th, 2006 at 10:38 pm

    Ridiculous numbers! 75M MySpace users that will help generate huge advertising revenue for News Corp. $580M for MySpace… well worth it considering Google paid 3x for YouTube.

    http://davidchao.typepad.com

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