Slashdot Mirror
MySpace Makes it to Top 10 Internet Sites
prostoalex writes "Nielsen//NetRatings Top 10 is a monthly rating of top 10 Internet destinations. Generally dominated by Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, AOL, eBay and similar major destinations, the list had a newcomer in March of this year. MySpace.com is 10th most visited Web site, losing to #9 Real.com only by 600,000 unique visits per month."
I just took this Nielson Net survey a few days ago (they sent me $15 cash!)
It is very long, but on some of the pages I noticed that sites like slashdot where not a choice to even select. On the page where myspace was a choice of sites you visit, livejournal was not! I'm not sure how well the "write-in" box at the bottom gets counted, but I really question the integrity of the whole thing.
Is it possible that RealPlayer connects to real.com to display it's web portal? I don't use it myself, but I seem to remember RealPlayer displaying the web portal by default.
MySpace is the worst thing for business productivity since Solitaire. We blocked MySpace a few weeks ago because it accounted for literally 10-15% of our company's outbound web traffic - I'm talking about thousands and thousands of MySpace URIs visited per day, at a company of ~75 people.
I have seen a lot of comments here regarding why Real.com is ranked so highly. It likely is because their player does access content from their site regularly.
Most North Americans and Europeans fail to understand how vastly popular RealPlayer is in Asia. There have been some reports of over 75% of Indian computer users using RealPlayer, since it has very good support for languages such as Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, and Hindi. It also has superb support for Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and other Asian languages, thus leading to a high degree of usage there (although not as much as in India).
I'm just a little suprised at the comments about MySpace. Clearly i am in a minority of /. readers who actually enjoys and uses MySpace. Granted, i only began using it a few weeks ago, but i have actually had fun using html and then teaching it to my friends so they can improve their pages. but most importantly, i have reconnected with a lot of old friends who now live in other cities. No other social networking website i have used before has been able to do that for me.
The real item of interest i thought was the "average usage time" stat. MySpace users average over 2 hours/session. Thats on par with ebay and Yahoo. and twice that of Google. thats a lot of ads. ads = $ = power whether the techno-istas poo-poo it or not.
I found it even more useful as a way to reconnect with people you haven't seen in awhile. I don't remember why I originally set up the page, but I managed to be found by people I haven't seen in 5-10 years. People who wandered to other parts of the globe. Of course I've had to deal with some more annoying aspects too, but the benefits definitely outweighed the costs. I just keep my friends list to people I've actually met in real life.
Different people get different things out of it. For me it's a way to update all of my friends in one spot. For others it is a competition to get as many friends on their list as possible.
I've also found it quite useful in discovering new music. I tend to listen to some of the more obscure genres so I can't hear the new stuff on the radio (except for the occasional college station). By looking at who is linked to bands I like, I can check them out, get a sample of their music and then decide if I want to hear more or not.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
People there are so obsessed with beating Slashdot that many actually installed Alexa specifically so that it could track their visits to Digg.
More such results continue on the second search page. Only on page 4 do they start to lose relevance (an interesting correlation with the study that was featured yesterday, n'est ce pas?)