It’s Official(ish): MySpace Is Biggest Site on Internet
Michael Arrington
85 comments »
The November Comscore numbers show the inevitable: Fox Interactive (mostly MySpace) now has more page views than the combined Yahoo sites, taking the no. 1 spot for the first time. This was less to do with MySpace growth than with a 9% dip in overall Yahoo traffic (total Internet traffic for all sites in November dipped just 3%; Google was up 5%).
Yahoo still dominates in total unique vistors, though, with over twice as many people visiting Yahoo sites as MySpace. The end game isn’t page views, its user attention and, ultimately, revenue. Still, MySpace has every reason to pop the champagne today and celebrate their 200% growth in page views over the last twelve months.
One or two quick acquisitions, of course, would put Yahoo right back in the no. 1 spot.
Evidently, the news of MySpace’s demise may be premature?
Damn…
I still don’t understand why it’s so popular despite of all these numbers. ^^
It should be noted (in the post), that Yahoo has said repeatedly that this was bound to happen with their use of Ajax in more and more applications.
sounds like Y! maybe going back for more talks with facebook…?
You can’t kill stupid.
I personally would not equate pageviews with being the ‘biggest’. Especially since a ton of those pageviews are ‘fillers’
May the Lord have mercy on our souls.
i think yahoo is going to look at facebook a little different now!
No way. Absolutely not.
First. Comscore’s numbers are highly prone to error. This is a bit like quoting Alexa.
Second. Myspace has had a bug where it NEVER remembers your login/password continually prompting you to login.
I couldn’t figure out WHY they would wait so long but really all you have to do is follow the money.
1. This increases pageviews (duh).
2. They serve ads on their login pages.
This is a prime example how advertising can corrupt your business and directly hurt your users. Maybe they don’t care but I DO think MySpace could probably make this revenue up in different areas.
Oh…. considering at least TWO pageviews per session are login pages I could easily see this throwing MySpace down by another 10% thereby giving Yahoo back their crown
Kevin
This is deceptive. Many MySpace ‘features’ work by refreshing the page over and over. Seems like Fox is levelling off in uniques.
How much of the pageviews of Yahoo’s properties are actually users clicking on their new emails, then going back to the index page?
Even when viewing Yahoo News - the same exact news stories are on a Yahoo Page, so users are NOT going to the original destinations or the news stories (unlike Google News).
Wow…I dont know how many people know abot Weblo.com. You make want to take a look. Wrote a piece on them recently. I think there success is predicated on building a virtual community within a virtual community…one that is for all intents an purposes self sufficient.
If they achieve even a fraction of what MySpace has done they will revolutionise the web for ever. Mr Rosenblatt is now at the helm of Weblo…so we should all look out……….
http://www.revafinancial.squarespace.com
myspace sucks. hates the wannabe web designer there
I will have to agree a bit with Harry. MySpace really needs to fix their network infrastructure as well as some of the coding on the sites. There needs to be less error time and more MySpace time.
Rex
While these numbers can be interpreted in a number of ways one thing is clear. MySpace is not dying anytime soon despite some people predicitng it’s demise and that users were abandoning the site in droves. It is interesting to note that the average daily minutes a user spends on a Yahoo site had dropped by 5 % (read this elsewhere)
Here, lemme fix the typo:
“MySpace Is Biggest Shite on Internet”
I think it is funny that everyone feels the need to bash MySpace. Yeah, the infrastructure sucks, and yeah there are a lot weirdos that use it but is growing by 200% a year and increasing revenue. It is a business people and that is what it is all about. You can bash it if you want but I am sure every other website would love to have those issues.
MySpace is the slowest, the ugliest and the most non-intuitive UI website I’ve seen to date! To be fair, probably it shares #1 in ugliness with eBay though.
I have a 12-megabit Internet connection and a pretty fast machine and still have to wait sometimes minutes for pages to load up. I could not believe that it’s so popular! This is one example of when the Wisdom of Crowds does not work.
@brianlmason
Do you know anything about Myspace’s quarterly revenue reports? Why do you conjecture that just because they have all this traffic that they have a lot of money rolling in?
If I read those charts properly, we’re talking 40 billion pages viewed by 60 million uniques.
Is it possible the average unique views 666ish pages per month?
If so, that’s approximately twice the Yahoo number.
Adrian. Not sure what Weblo has to do with this article. Way to work in a good plug though.
Alaska,
Not saying the are profitable yet, but barring a complete business screw up their revenue should be increasing as their popularity grows. You’ll note I just said they are increasing their revenue. Not trying to make predictions on their profit just yet.
I agree they have issues, but I just think it is funny that people mock a business model that seems to be working (or at least better than most). You may not like their format or the people that use it but there are lot of other sites out there that are doing worse. We just don’t knock them because they don’t make the headlines every day.
Unbelievable. I remember when an employee was using myspace in 2005 and i had no idea what it was. With all the free website hosting companies (angelfire, geocities, homestead etc), i didnt see a need for another. All these companies missed users in need of connecting (if you can consider a large myspace friends list connecting).
I cant believe that people are really interested in other peoples lives that much. Not to mention that people want so much of their personal info floating around.
We do live in some scary times.
Shouldn’t the title read
“It’s Official(ish): MySpace Is Biggest Shit on Internet”
Is there a web company that acts as a bookie for wagers of all sorts?
If so, I’d like to continue my thread from the recent TC post about Yahoo-Facebook, in which I said Facebook is on the up and up — I was even so bold as to say that it was gonna slowly but surely eat Myspace’s lunch, and I’d like to place money on that last point.
Shit, there’s no Bet 2.0 wagering site, so…
Bet me, anyway. Please. Especially the gentlepeople who disagreed with what I had to say about the long-term value of Facebook.
You can reach me here: ereldon@gmail.com.
Exact terms of the wager to be mutually agreed upon.
its strange y peple cant digest the facts and are always jeolus of successfull people or companies.
i guess most people hate myspace for the same reason y so many more hated microsoft
Its like that scene from Gladiator, “win the crowd, win your freedom”, its obvious to see where the crowd is- mainstream.
I wonder how much of the drop is related to the new AJAX based interface for Yahoo! mail? Anybody know how bing a deal this is?
The reason Myspace is so succesful despite its problems is that it was:
1. First
2. Has THE content most people are looking for and more of it than any other similar service.
i thought the universe revolves around Google? what about Google?
I’m pretty sure if you removed Yahoo Mail from the equation the number would drop by more than half.
I have used myspace but I am not a fan of it…and always wonder why are people so crazy about it; good for Microsoft who always showcase MySpace in TechEd and other conferences as myspace is completely deployed on Windows platform.
Anyway, coming to the point, so now that Yahoo finds itself overtaken in page views, probably they will go for a high profile acquisition like facebook…
Where am I? Under rocks?? I have never ventured myself in finding out what is My Space. This is news to me that they are #1. WOW!
Can someone tell me in brief what are the benefits of having My Space when there are so many other free spaces available on the net?
none! it was there first, compared to something like Vox Myspace is a homeless loser drinking it’s own urine!!
;o)
Social Networking gaining Flab.
To all of yall people who doesnt like myspace, I totally understand your thoughts of how the errors and the vague graphics and design lacks alot of depth.. But remember its a mainstream site and mainstream is the masses of crowd.. You know people follow others like sheep. Where they go you go.. People who lack technical sence and the demand for proper design does not apply to them.. They dont care if it lacks bad graphics . Why? because myspace focus on service .. and the user interface. myspace lets u edit a whole lot.. In fact they let you edit your entire webpage and customize it to whatever you like. This is what people LOVE about myspace they can have their own free WEBPAGE with their own graphic. they can post pictures. Post music. Post Videos.. all in one. and whatelse .. yeah they can have a HUGE FRIENDSLIST confirming that people like them and read their blogs or write to them.. they get a social interface that lets you expose yourself to all or just keep it private to your friends. And all of this and some more functions makes myspace the biggest website in the world.. You must understand just because WE the “TECHNICAL” people doesnt like the site doesnt mean everyone else doesnt like it.. Compare it to Mcdonalds and we are the special restaurant … some people rather go to mcdonalds then a proper meal at a real restaurant!!
Michael,
Again you are using US-ONLY numbers, and proclaiming they say ANYTHING about world-wide usage! The internet is more than Ye Olde U S of A…
myspace the biggest site? not for me
myspace is huge cause its teh best site eva!!!!!1!!!
Michael,
I cannot believe you did this again. After the last lasing you (and this site) received for posting about a site’s visits/traffic using Comscore and Alexa as references. — At least this time, you didn’t mention Alexa.
The “stats” you provided are more than uesless.
MySpace may be more popular in the US than Yahoo… but even as a resident of the US, it’s more than obvious that there is more to the world than just us.
Are you trying to promote MySpace or something? This story… the last… is there more to this?
It’s too bad MySpace is just a fad. In five years kids will make fun of each other because they once had a MySpace page. It’s like Z. Cavericcis (sp?) for the internet generation. MySpace is the Kriss Kross of the internet right now and everyone wants on board. Social Networking may be the next big thing, but it won’t be in the form of MySpace. I am not a Yahoo or Myspace user, but I am sure that the name Yahoo will exist long after MySpace is forgotten.
Day by day Myspace is getting over crowded so they are deleting people myspace accounts without any prior notice and they have not mention any where about the restoration of these deleted accounts. So, what’s the use of being a big site on the internet?
I’m not at all surprised that MySpace has all these pageviews and Yahoo! dominates on uniques. Last night I watched some diseased MySpace page refresh every couple of seconds and it seems most of the ones I’ve looked at do it. With the above login bug they’ve made a license to print money as long as advertisers are stupid enough to pay for those impressions.
I think the Ajax implementation in Yahoo Mail has a lot to do with the drop in Yahoo page views. Yahoo Mail accounts for a significant portion of Yahoo page views.
As far as MySpace is concerned, I agree that the GUI, graphics and so called “creative content” on there is not very good. But I also agree with Rizal that what’s ugly for Techies does not matter as long as the everyday users are ok with it (and that may very well be because they don’t have any other choice or simply because using MySpace is the current fad).
A potential solution is to make websites/platforms that allow users to generate better “creative” content without having to deal with HTML etc. Sites like ZCubes (http://www.zcubes.com) are trying to provide such functionality.
Michael,
With all due respect, why do you keep making the same mistake? I understand that part of your schtick is to bring sensationalism to tech reporting, but there’s a difference beteween being sensationalistic and just being misleading or inaccurate.
THE COMSCORE NUMBERS ARE US ONLY.
The title might have read “It’s Official(ish): MySpace Is Biggest Site in US”
I’m not sure how many times you have to hear your readers bashing your poor sense of geography before it sinks in: the United States, despite your repeated assertions, is NOT the only country in the world, nor is it the same as the entire world (since you often compare US-only numbers to global numbers).
Seriously, is it that hard to understand that ComScore measures US traffic, and that there are some 200-odd countries that are not the United States? Seriously.
even if comscore has issues, yahoo’s fall from numero uno is inevitable at some point. this will hurt yahooers who have been clinging to the traffic bragging rights like a wino clings to his bottle of prince machibelli
Jeez yet another example of biased figures
Myspaces figures are for its Global traffic, as it only has one site, Yahoo’s figures are for its US site only, Yahoo has a significant audience outside of the US, I would not be suprised if yahoo US’s traffic only accounted for 40% of the total. Secondly, Yahoo has multiple properties outside of the yahoo.com domain, such as flickr, del.ico.us etc, Thirdly Yahoo has been heading into the Ajax side of the web for the last few years, and is an extensive publisher of API’s allowing yahoo content to be embedded in other sites, both of which result in distribution without acredited PV’s.
This just goes to show how irrelevant traditional stats are becomming in the modern web world, its time new metrics of user engagement with sites where derived and published in order to show the real picture.
The next “plain to see”-step to world dominiation is myspace as a part of google, isn’t it?
You cannot go by these figures, a developer should be trying to minimise the number of hits the servers get. The less the better for everyone.
If you look at yahoo, they are getting twice as many unique visitors but yet their number of hits is the same as MySpace. I’ve only used MySpace a little so I don’t know too much about it but it is definetely a click, refresh, refresh, click, refresh, refresh type of site.
This would’ve been a fantastic opportunity to really acquaint your users with Swivel which you reviewed just last week:
http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Swivel/
Imagine what we would’ve all done with the data…
Myspace is popular in the US. How about other countries? Seldom even ever heard of Myspace. While Yahoo is really powerful in some other regions.
-Mike
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
Page hits are ideally the wrong measure for success. A good user experience is in fact contrary to visiting more pages. Making the site more usable means having the person click through less pages.
Of course if your business is built around flashing ads, then you want to force your users to travel through more pages. You want to make the site less usable and confuse them so they click around trying to figure it out. You want to require page refresh for alerts so when they are waiting for something they have to keep coming back and keep refreshing (evil laugh here).
Does it matter? The user wins with a free service. MySpace wins with every nickel per page view. The suckers are those people paying for ad banners that everyone ignores. Ah, beautiful.
Myspace is going nuts. Deleting millions of user profiles in an attempt to fight spam. Taking no prisoners and not caring how many legit users they delete. They might wreck the place.
I have been trying for 6 weeks to get on my space so i could get a web page too. But my space keeps giving me this 45fg or 54gg i don’t know what is wrong, but could you please help me get a web page on my space? thank you
Your invitation to play LOST:
http://www.lost.eu/20ac1