MySpace Becomes Third Most-Viewed Site?

AOL, eBay, and Google might just be watching their backs: comScore Media Metrix says social networking site MySpace has passed them all in terms of page views.

When you think of the most-viewed sites on the Internet, users naturally think of search engines and portals: Yahoo, Google, AOL, maybe even Ask.com. Perhaps some retail and ecommerce sites like Amazon.com and eBay are in the same category, and maybe sites like UPS, FedEx, and iTunes garner some pretty respectable traffic.

But a social networking site? Puh-leaze.

Well, welcome to the real world, at least according to comScore’s Media Metrix Internet audience ratings measurements, which currently puts social networking site MySpace third most-viewed site on the Internet in terms of total page views, ahead of Internet stalwarts Google, AOL, and eBay.

Recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., MySpace is a social networking site which refers to itself as a “lifestyle portal” combining user profiles, blogs, instant messaging, user photos, music streaming, classified ads, groups, community forums, email, and more. MySpace users find other users with similar interests and lifestyles which can then translate into users’ “offline social experience.” Although MySpace has a reputation as something of a sleazy flirting and hook-up site, MySpace claims to gain an average of 150,000 new members every day and serve more than 11.5 billion pages a month, which is certainly of interest to advertisers. A substantial subset of the MySpace is centered around music: more than half a million bands and performers have set up accounts on MySpace to stream their recordings and other material to fans, and some of those are certainly driving traffic toward MySpace and its easy-to-set-up, no-hassle music hosting is often simpler than that offers by other online music distributors (OMDs). MySpace says its future content announcements and features will continue to draw new and returning visitors, and the site is beginning to feature exclusive high-profile content unavailable elsewhere on the Internet, such as new “confessions” from pop star Madonna in support of her latest album.