MySpace a hit with Hitwise but not elsewhere

Stan Beer
Thursday, 13 July 2006 04:39

Your IT - Home IT

The folks at Hitwise obviously have a very different formula for ranking web site usage than other analytics firms. In what must be the most incredulous claim of the month, Hitwise asserts that social networking site MySpace has displaced Yahoo! as the number one ranking website for page views in the US.

Despite the Hitwise claim, figures from other respected web site monitors show that MySpace is not even close to the number spot in terms of page views. For instance, global figures from online monitor Alexa.com shows MySpace ranking at number five, with Yahoo easily maintaining a significant edge in page views. According to Alexa.com, Yahoo! has at least three times as many page views on average as MySpace.

Some market watchers believe a weakness in the Hitwise ranking system is that it does not measure unique visitors to a site, which is increasingly being viewed as a much more important indicator of traffic than page views. According to Alexa.com, Yahoo! traffic in terms of visitors, is an order of magnitude greater than MySpace.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels.

Other web analytics firms, such as Nielsen, also disagree with the Hitwise ranking, still showing Yahoo! at the top, with MySpace well down the list.

Needless to say, Yahoo! is not impressed with the latest Hitwise claim. According to a Washington Post report, 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)."

Finally, the figures of Hitwise were based solely on US statistics, where MySpace is popular. Elsewhere, MySpace does not have any where near the same penetration as in the US and certainly nowhere near that of Yahoo!, which is a global brand.