MarketingVOX: Social-networking site MySpace.com has surpassed internet powerhouses Yahoo Mail and Google as the most popular U.S. website, according to research from Hitwise, writes the Globe and Mail (Reg. required). In the week ended July 8, 4.5 percent of all U.S. visits to the web were to MySpace.com, and traffic to the social-networking site has soared 132 percent in the last year alone, Hitwise said.

"To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years," writes Bill Tancer of Hitwise in a blog post.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the site a year ago for $580 million, with the hope of capitalizing on the online advertising boom. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, the site has "reached the mainstream," but he says it commands 20-50 percent less for ads than other top sites, because advertisers aren't yet comfortable with the format.