MySpace Passes Yahoo In Page Views But Not Audience

I’ve been waiting for comScore to publicly post figures on November 2006 traffic before pointing to the news of MySpace topping Yahoo in terms of page views. But everyone’s getting into it, so I’ll pass it along now as well.

Stats are from the Associated Press:

News Corp.’s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo, according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace’s growth was 2% over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.

The AP also notes:

ComScore had planned to release the numbers Wednesday or Thursday, but word of the figures leaked in an analyst report from UBS Investment Research.

They didn’t leak. UBS, along with other companies, purchases the right to early release of comScore data. Then a few days later, comScore releases some of this to the world.

The figures were put out in a UBS research note from Benjamin Schachter, who gets cited in this Red Herring report. I get Ben’s notes regularly (and they’re good), as do many others. For ages, his clients get comScore figure out a few days before the general public. As I said, I usually wait until the public data is out there before touching on them.

Want the full rundown? Watch here. That’s the comScore press page. You can see the October ratings here. Note that those won’t be page views but rather share of visitors. Yahoo’s still up in that, and here’s some spin on the page views from the AP article:

Yahoo, which last week announced a major reorganization after finding itself repeatedly beat in advertising sales by rival Google, still remains the leader in unique audience, with 130 million visitors in November.

"Yahoo continues to be the overall Web audience leader with the largest number of unique users and most time spent online. The page view change in November is related to the use of Ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies across the Yahoo network," Yahoo spokeswoman Nissa Anklesaria said Tuesday.

"These technologies enhance the overall user experience, but do not either generate a page view or qualify to be counted as a page view while the user is engaged with the product," she said.