A year ago, people were shaking their heads when Rupert Murdoch shelled out $580 million dollars for teen-oriented online community site MySpace. Look who’s laughing now: according to Internet tracking firm Hitwise, MySpace has taken over the title as the number one site on the Web, accounting for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits during the week ending July 8. That puts Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition ahead of Yahoo Mail for the first time, and leaves the home pages for Internet portals like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail in the dust.
According to Hitwise, MySpace accounted for nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking sites, which means MySpace is actually gaining share at the expense of other community sites for users into sharing music, photos, video, and other interests.
Hitwise doesn’t break down its figures to calculate the number of unique visitors
