Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace’s growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.
The chart below shows the growth of visits to myspace.com compared to google.com over the last several months:
An even more telling statistic is the prevalence of MySpace search terms within the top 20 search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites. The table below shows those top terms for the four weeks ending July 8, 2006.
Top Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Sites: Week Ending July 8, 2006
Compare that to the table below, which shows the top search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites for the same time last year:
Top Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Sites: Week Ending July 9, 2005
While Internet visits statistics tell us where people are going on the Internet, search term data confirms what people are actually thinking about. It’s clear from this data that MySpace has the mind share of US Internet users. Stay tuned for more analysis as to how MySpace was able to achieve such phenomenal growth over the last two years.