A study released recently by the Internet traffic measurement firm Hitwise has confirmed the ascendant trend of News Corp.'s MySpace.com. So much so that the ranking put together by Hitwise has MySpace as the new leader of the most trafficked web sites in the US with Yahoo falling down to second position and Google and MSN closing the leading pack in third an fourth positions. The traffic analysis has reveled that of the total Internet visits for the week that ended with July 8th, MySpace accounted for a percentage of 4.46. The study doesn't however provide metrics for the number of unique visitors, counting the audience indiscriminately.

The same study shows that Yahoo has kept the overall lead because combining the audience figures of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo.com and Yahoo search, the actual share of the online giant is 10% out of all the Internet visits, while doing a same calculus for the similar web sites belonging to MySpace, the percentage is somewhere in the vicinity of 7.3%.

Yahoo has said that it represents a conglomerate of Internet services and that a comparison between MySpace and only one of the webs sited labeled Yahoo will lead to an inaccurate conclusion. In this context the online giant brought forward other traffic metrics according to which it attracts more than 29 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. In comparison to its 74% share of the market, MySpace only accounts for 30% meaning approximately 52 million unique users.

The conclusion of the analysis is that despite being overall second to Yahoo, MySpace is the fastest growing social networking site on the Internet, and an alternative advertising market.