YouTube Did Not Beat MySpace, Not Even Close

A Guardian Unlimited story has floated around all day with the headline "YouTube overtakes MySpace," detailing how the video-sharing website had surpassed MySpace in daily global Internet visits. Unfortunately, it's flat out wrong. YouTube's not even close. Guardian's Mark Sweney (didn't he play for the Giants? No that was report on data provided by Internet analysis company Alexa. While it's true that Alexa data shows MySpace's 3.35%, Sweney fails to provide perspective on the numbers. Alexa data is by its nature skewed from the outset. The data is collected via voluntarily installed toolbars, the great majority of which are used by webmasters. Surely, somebody in the blogosphere would point this out. Well, the article snowed a few of them, but there were a couple of observers out there. They must have read Matt Cutts' recent I'm clearly getting some boost from webmaster bias because so many SEOs read my blog. Am I getting a boost from anything else?I think the answer is that I'm getting a bit of geek boost too Alexa data is skewed to represent what's popular among Webmasters and geeks. Between YouTube and MySpace, which do you think attracts more of the geek audience, a haven for visual stimulus or a haven for pop culture teenie-boppers and pedophiles? I'll withdraw the question, Your Honor. It's argumentative. Curious about what another metrics firm had to say about the YouTube and MySpace traffic, I pegged Hitwise for their take. According to Hitwise's data, for the week ending July 29th, MySpace.com controlled 4.73% of US visits across all categories. YouTube attracted just (squinting) 0.23% (see graph below).