Yahoo has issued a rather hoity-toity response to Hitwise's stats that claimed MySpace is now the number 1 domain on the Web. Sniffs Yahoo in its official statement:

"The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month."

The statement goes on to assert that Yahoo! gets 129 million unique visitors per month in the US, "which represents 74 percent of the online population". Itsy-bitsy MySpace on the other hand, "reaches only 30 percent". But wait, Yahoo's not finished reprimanding Hitwise just yet. "In addition", the Yahoo statement points out, "Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time."

So there: nya nya naa naa na! Incidentally Yahoo's stats were pulled from comScore Media Metrix's June report (a Hitwise competitor).

But in all seriousness, Yahoo! does have a point that it is still "the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online". To suggest otherwise is a little disingenuous. Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny goes further, saying that Hitwise's post "feels a lot like Hitwise trading their credibility for some cheap press headlines."

To be fair, what Hitwise claimed was that MySpace was "the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users" (emphasis mine). So technically, according to Hitwise's data, that's a true statement. But as Jeremy said, it's a bit of a headline-grabbing statement and open to misinterpretation.

So anyway, as long as we're all clear now - Yahoo is the number 1 Web property.