Earlier this week, market research firm Hitwise reported that the popularity of Myspace.com has surged past prominent position : In fact, Myspace.com for the first time fetched more market share than any other US website, including properties such as the main sites of Yahoo, Google or MSN.

It did not take long for some sites to challenge the findings and issue statements. Especially Yahoo was not happy about the report and accused Hitwise of publishing misleading numbers and not highlighting the fact that the Yahoo network has a greater reach than MySpace.

"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," Yahoo said I a statement.

Web analytics firm Comscore Media Metrix estimates that Yahoo attracts about 129 million unique visitors per month ; MySpace is listed with an audience of about 52 million unique visitors.