Yesterday Hitwise blogged a striking discovery: MySpace is bigger than anyone online. Well, sort of anyway – the fine print read:
…www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users.
Today, Yahoo begged to differ, issuing its own release. From the Mail & Guardian online coverage:
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.
Reminds me of last summer…
That’s a great point. I love Hitwise’s methodology and their blog, but if they are going to play this game they need to do a better job categorizing properties vs. domains.
I work at Compete, Inc and last week we introduced a free analytics tool which provides normalized ‘people projections’ (ie. unique visitors) and rankings.
http://home.compete.com
The issue with Hitwise rankings is that they rely on aggregated raw pageviews to determine their rankings – science and normalization tends to be void from the equation. Compete metrics provide a view into the actual population of users, which provides an alternative view on this story. Based on Compete metrics MySpace is only ranked #9 on the internet.
Compete’s release is a beta, but is on schedule to introduce several enhanced analytics in the near future.
An associate of mine is putting together Compete’s analysis on Yahoo vs. MySpace and will post his findings in the next 24 hours.
Thanks.
On their blog they called it right saying it is the number 1 domain (but even that is a gray area, it is actually more correct to hall it a hostname), but in their press release they say website which is totally misleading. Could be just a matter of their marketing/pr people being stupid about the lingo. Stats are all about trust, this tarnishes their image a bit in my view.