Jeremy Zawodny noticed that HitWise’s recent statement about MySpace was misleading because MySpace was being compared to Yahoo Mail, not the whole of Yahoo or even Yahoo Mail with all it’s international versions.

"I was mildly alarmed when I first heard the noise but spent a few minutes looking into it and now understand a bit more of what’s going on."

"….It’s hard to blame people for jumping to the wrong conclusions. On their blog post the wise folks at Hitwise managed to make this as confusing as possible for someone who isn’t reading carefully (you know, skimming)."

"……They used a headline which implied that MySpace is the biggest site on the web. But one you start reading the text, you find that they’re comparing www.myspace.com to "Yahoo! Mail." Seriously. So what’s a site? A domain name? What about international versions?

1. They included a completely unrelated graph that shows how www.myspace.com compares with www.google.com over time. (I wonder if they run the numbers without the www prefix?)
2. They further confuse things by providing a table of search referral terms that constitute what we call "navigational queries" to illustrate… something. But does that make any sense? Why would a Yahoo! user use a search to find Yahoo? Or a Google user use Google to find Google?

"..It seems to confirm what we all knew already: MySpace is growing like a weed. Duh. But "bigger" than Yahoo? Not by a long shot. Don’t make me dig up user statistics, time spent on site, and all that other stuff."

Honestly, I noticed the Yahoo Mail thing too - it raised a yellow flag - but I did not actually question it - maybe I should have when I posted yesterday on MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites.