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."

But

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Real?

[Odiumjunkie]

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.

Biggest productivity-killer around

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cheap & Easy to Use ... but is it Classy?

[rewinn]

MySpace is an apparently successful implementation of the concept that "anyone can have a useful web site without much work."

TruGeeks may prefer to buy (actually "rent") a domain name, rent space somewhere, AND maintaine the site using the technology du jour, but for a great many people, myspace does what they need without their having to think too hard about it, or to pay for it.

The question I still have is whether myspace URLs connote poorly, relative to unique-domain URLs, in the same way that AOL or hotmail addresses connote poorly, compared to unique-domain URLs do. In case this is unclear, let me offer an example. I think most people will agree that [e-mail] connotes something a little less classy than [e-mail]. The question is, will myspace have sufficient acceptance that a URL such as http://www.myspace.com/rewinn [myspace.com] will be an acceptable substitute for something like http://rewinn.com [rewinn.com]?

hmm

[Billly Gates]

I wonder what www.slashdot.org is? It has to be up there in the top 30 at least.

top quality crap.

[marcushnk]

Bloody impressive setup..
I decided to go have a look and see what myspace is all about, jumped on the "tour" and then found that the second page in was broken:
http://www.modmeup.net/wp-content/myspace-brkn.png [modmeup.net]

Quality setup guys... :-P

RealPlayer highly popular in Asia.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

What would make a better myspace?

[bloodstar]

I ask, because I've been working on creating a new social networking site that's geared more towards the academic side. There's still a lot of work to do on the site, but I'm curious what features people would want from a more academic standpoint? (Maybe this would be a good Ask Slashdot)?

http://www.apbctr.com/ [apbctr.com] Please understand that it's still a massive work in progress, and effectively one person doing the coding and another person doing the economics (I hope the webserver can handle it).

I'll be curious what people suggest...

$30 a year???

[Frosty Piss]

You'd think that since you can get a domain plus enough hosting to do a mypsace page without the noob for about $30 a year...

You're paying WAY too much.

not your space

[samnice]

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.

Linux users can be proud...

[Glowing Fish]

Usually, I like to point out that many very mainstream, popular corporate website runs on Linux, or else on commercial Unix.

But, in this case, I think I can proudly say, Myspace is running Windows.

Myspace on netcraft [netcraft.com]

Re:Content Trumps Design

[cide1]

I'll second this. Myspace may get the most hits overall, but here at Purdue, everyone who does this sort of thing uses Facebook. Facebook is infinitly better than Myspace. The photo album feature makes it easy to share photos, and the privacy of Facebook has much better granularity. Furthermore, you have to belong to one of the Universities (or now some highschools) to use it. I believe this is enforced by email address, at least it used to be. This keeps the 40 year old creeps away.

There's another possible reason..

[Wah]

..they could be trying to spoil the pool.

I used to run the databases for the a marketing company that would try to mimic Neilsen's (and Arbitron's) methodology for selecting people. We would then bombard the neighborhood with direct mail for radio and TV stations. Contests and write ins and such.

The idea was to get the call letters top of mind so that if a real journal came in, the target would remember that, write it down, and it would be like all 10,000 people you mailed were listening/watching.

Re:in other news

[sacdelta]

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.

Best use for myspace I've heard

[The Wooden Badger]

Love line was on the radio at work the other night and I heard Dr. Drew saying how he used myspace. When his girls meet some boy and he has a myspace page, Dr. Drew takes a look and can make a reasonable judgement call of "you are not going to see this guy again" or "have fun". I have to keep that in mind when my daughter gets a little older.

Re:You're an order of magnitude off

[caffeination]

Which explains this:

• Digg creeps ever closer to Slashdot [digg.com]
• Digg closes in on Slashdot [digg.com]
• DIGG should catch Slashdot this month Check out the huge traffic increase [digg.com]
• Digg breaks top 5000 ranking on Alexa.com [digg.com]
• Digg vs. Slashdot Alexia Graph [digg.com]
• First time ever: Digg officially surpasses Slashdot [digg.com]
• What happened to Slashdot 2 [digg.com]
• Engadget and Digg both bigger than Slashdot now! [digg.com]
• Digg overtakes Slashdot [digg.com]

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 [google.co.uk]. Only on page 4 do they start to lose relevance (an interesting correlation with the study that was featured yesterday, n'est ce pas?)