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.Hitwise does not provide figures for the number of unique visitors to a site.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.Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million one year ago as part of a strategy to rapidly build up the media conglomerate’s Internet presence.
Reuters
