Reuters reports that MySpace now ranks as the top U.S. website.
Online teen hangout MySpace.com ranked as the No. 1 U.S. Web site last week, displacing Yahoo Inc.'s top-rated e-mail gateway and Google Inc.'s search site, Internet tracking firm Hitwise said on Tuesday.
News Corp.'s MySpace 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.
MySpace also gained marketshare from other social networks.
MySpace, which dominates social networking on the Web, also gained 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.
A HitWise article says MySpace US Internet visits have grown 4300% in two years and 132% since last year. Apparently, Google could have purchase MySpace at one point in time for $290 million. MySpace lists over 92 million members and continues to grow. However, they are still threatened by the DOPA bill which could restrict students access to MySpace and other social networks while they are at public schools or public libraries.
Update 7-12-06
Yahoo has rejected this claim calling it "misleading." They claim only Yahoo Mail was considered and that all of Yahoo's properties make it bigger than MySpace.
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.
Jeremy Zawodny has a post explaining Yahoo's position.
Reuters 
