This morning Smaran Dayal noticed that YouTube had overcome MySpace in the Alexa rankings. Dayal points out that although MySpace is still ahead of YouTube in pageviews, it has fallen behind in both Alexa rank and daily reach. MySpace is currently ranked at #6 while YouTube has risen to #4.
As I have said in the past Alexa rankings should always be taken with a grain of salt but they are an interesting gross indicator of trends. How are the rankings determined?
Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.
I would tend to agree that YouTube is more popular right now. Even if you don’t use either heavily, think about it on a practical level – how many stories have you heard about YouTube in the last few months? What about MySpace? The Google acquisition of YouTube really propelled it to a new level. Interesting to watch…
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2 Responses to “YouTube Passes MySpace in Alexa Rankings”
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I agree- YouTube has the big buzz in the industry now. Especially because My Space is becoming over run with Spam, and they do not have a good video streaming feature.
An interesting side note is also that people use YouTube to stream videos on MySpace, so that makes the user group the same in many cases, which in turn increases popularity to YouTube!.
Cool read!
I’m not yet sure how substantive this is. When people are on YouTube, their eyes are “stuck” to the video player. When they’re on MySpace, they’re wandering all over the page trying to absorb information. I have a funny feeling that advertising on MySpace is still worth more.