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Yahoo! wasn't at all happy with Hitwise's announcement that MySpace.com had surpassed Yahoo! as most-visited site on the Web. In fact, they were downright indignant.

A Yahoo! spokesperson called the report, which put www.myspace.com above mail.yahoo.com in terms of market share "misleading." She also said my story about it yesterday was "INCORRECT" in large, flaming letters in my inbox. Just behind the "please take swift action" text, one could hear an exacerbated "hrrrumph!" trotting spike-heeled and horn-rimmed in front of a chastising slap to the chops.

Okay, okay. I'll tell them -- even though Hitwise has a chart and everything.

Yahoo! says the report was misleading because it was not accurate to compare MySpace.com to only Yahoo!'s mail.yahoo.com domain. The Yahoo! portal is made up of several domains, (three of them were included in the Hitwise top 10), and when taken together as an entire network, Yahoo! remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month.

Using comScore Media Metrix numbers, Yahoo! says in the US, its portal is visited by 129 million visitors per month, representing 74 percent of the online population. MySpace reaches 30 percent of the online population, or 52 million unique visitors. In addition, Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users' online time, compared to just 3.2 percent by MySpace.

So there.

Hitwise could not be reached before publication.

Update

Hitwise responded to Yahoo!'s claims (and was much nicer about it, too):

"Hitwise ranks over 500,000 websites on a daily basis that includes individual sites as well as the domains and sub-domains of larger websites. The press release issued yesterday included the top-10 domains and at no time, did we represent all MySpace properties compared to all Yahoo properties. The table included in the press release listed the rank order of the individual domains and sub-domains as reported from our data."

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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.