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.
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.