Readers Digest Version of the Controversy:
Hitwise recently released a report stating that in June MySpace overtook Yahoo as the largest internet property. Yahoo got upset and poked several holes in the analysis and refused to give up their heavy weight championship belt. Compete jumped into the fray to provide an alternative view of “who’s the biggest”.

Yahoo! wins the people… MySpace wins the page views…
In terms of unique visitors, Yahoo.com remains the most trafficked U.S. Internet destination online with a whopping 117 million unique visitors in June (for a clear comparison, we aggregated all sub-domains for both Yahoo.com and MySpace.com).

In terms of page views, MySpace.com overtook Yahoo.com and stole the #1 rank back in January ’06 – which is amazing in itself when you think about how many page views Yahoo! Mail generates. (Mail accounts for ~ 50% of Yahoo page views compared to Search which only accounts for ~8%).

For a clearer picture, take a look at the charts below:

Bottom Line:

To overtake Yahoo! and win the coveted “most trafficked U.S. Internet destination” title, MySpace needs to convince a whole lot more people (over 64 million) to add “Tom” as a friend. MySpace has grown by over 38% since January while Yahoo! has only grown its visitor base by 5% - so anything is possible, but the smart money is on Yahoo! to stay champ for quite sometime.

Note: All metrics mentioned in this post represent U.S. traffic only.

How does the Compete Toolbar estimate site traffic and internet rank?

Based on the daily web usage of more than 2 million people (and growing!), Compete calculates total traffic and rank for nearly every site on the web. We use rigorous statistics to make sure our estimates balance demographic and connection factors that match the entire US internet population. For now, we only calculate the number of people in the US that visit any given website each month. Compete online metrics are leveraged by some of the largest companies in the US and often cited in national and industry publications like USA Today, Wall Street Journal and The NY Times.

To check your website’s rank, visit: http://home.compete.com

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