In the latest podcast episode on DNR, Scott Guthrie is quoted as mentioning that in terms of web traffic, MySpace surpassed Yahoo to be #1 this past month. The point he wanted to bring out with this interesting fact was that MySpace was an early adopter of ASP.NET 2.0 since the release candidates. They had switched from another web framework and enjoyed nearly a server load drop by 2/3rd. Naturally, this does not mean a decrease in the size of their datacenter as they experience growth, etc.
I found this particular to be particularly interesting and slightly surprising. Upon discussing this with fellow co-workers, they were quite skeptical of this piece of news.
I am curious about the source of the web traffic metrics Scott has access to (Update: See the bottom of this entry). It appears to be non-public information gathered by a third party (i.e. Nielsen Netratings). According to publicly accessible information, yahoo.com and msn.com still show up as #1 & 2 respectively (Global)
The highest ranking that I was able to find for MySpace was for the US rankings, where it ranked #3 behind Yahoo and Google and ahead of MSN. Another source publicly available is comScore. They released rankings of top sites in France, where Google and Microsoft placed 1 & 2. Note that they mention the metrics are for unique visitors.
Ranking.com currently lists msn.com as #1! Their claim is "Our rankings are based on what is popular among web users not any artificial methods". What this is implies, I have no idea. If you are interested in Web Traffic Measuring Strategies, you can check out the wikipedia entry, under "Measuring web traffic".
Compete.com allows you to input domains and see the graph trends over a period of time. The graph displayed below is for the "number of people in the U.S. estimated to have visited a domain. People counts are also known as unique visitors.." Note the time frame and the almost linear increase of myspace.com.
And according to quantcast.com, myspace is listed at #10. Google, Yahoo and MSN is are #1, 2 and 3.
Another interesting bit was Scott's mention that MySpace enjoys 2-2.5 billion page views per day, with 4-5 million simultaneous connections during peak times. It is notable that MSN also enjoys comparable page view metrics.
So with all the different sources ranging from Alexa to Scott Guthrie, who is right?
The answer: they could all be right or wrong.
As with any market research and analysis performed, the numbers may be affected by the validity of the samples obtained. (i.e. whether you covered a representative age demographic reflective of the entire Internet population, etc). Having been involved in the market research software tool development industry, one of the early arguments against conducting surveys online was the problem of sampling. The less fortunate may lack the resources to surf the web. In your study, if it was essential to include people on both sides of the economic spectrum, then you were out of luck. So, you avoided these studies. Interestingly enough, similar problems exist with telephone surveys as more and more individuals resort to mobile communications as their primary mode of contact. Therefore, you are left with individuals answering the phone at a particular time during the day who may be identified categorically in one bucket. Anyway, I digress. As a statistician once mentioned to me in my early days, if the common things like standard deviation, variance, errors are not mentioned in the results, then the validity of the study is questionable. Finally, you need to be conscious of exactly what they are measuring for. By popular site, they may mean anything from unique visitors, to page views, to average duration spent on a site, to pages viewed/visit. (In Scott's case, he was referring to page views.)
The long winded moral of the story: take these metrics with a grain of salt. But at the end of the day, at least you can come away with knowledge of the major players.
(As of writing this, the DNR site appears to be down. Since it doesn't appear on the DotNetRocks MSDN site which only goes to ep 205 right now, you may have to wait for it to come back up. 1/2/2007 show with Scott Guthrie.)
(Update: The local news from in mid-December stated that ComScore highlighted that MySpace surpassed Yahoo in web traffic for the first time. You can read about it here.)