MySpace most popular website in the US

By Steve Malone

Posted on 13 Jul 2006 at 10:59

The social networking phenomenon that is MySpace is now the most popular site in the United States. According to the latest numbers published by Hitwise, MySpace now accounts for 4.46 per cent of all visits in the US.

It means that MySpace has overtaken Yahoo!'s email service, which has 4.42 percent, Yahoo!'s home page (4.25 percent), and Google (3.89 percent) although Yahoo! points out that it still gets more share of visits than anyone else if you combine its totals.

However, there is no disputing MySpace's dominance within the field of social networking. MySpace holds an overwhelming 79.9 per cent of the total number of visits. The next biggest network is Facebook with a comparatively tiny 7.5 percent share then Xanga with 3.8 per cent. All of these sites cater to a predominately teen and twenty-something demographic.

The growth of MySpace has been phenomenal. According to Hitwise figures, in July 2004 myspace.com represented only 0.1 per cent of all Internet visits. A year later this figure had risen to 1.9 per cent of all Internet visits. By the week ending July 8, 2006, the US market share figure was 4.5 per cent. This means that MySpace has shown a 4,300 per cent increase in visits over two years and a 132 per cent increase in visits in the last twelve months.

Hitwise also points out that MySpace is topping the search charts as well. In the week ending July 8th 2006, the keyword 'MySpace' took a massive 0.77 per cent of all search term traffic in the US. In second place 'myspace.com' clocked up 0.51 per cent of searches and no, we don't know why people type the domain name into a search engine either.

By comparison, in the same week last year eBay was top but with only 0.31 per cent of the total. Incidentally, eBay as a search term has hardly dropped back at all but is now in third place with a 0.29 per cent search term share.