Fox Sites Top Yahoo as Most-Visited on U.S. Web

Spurred by the popularity of MySpace, News Corp. sites have overtaken Yahoo sites as the most viewed by U.S. Internet users, according to new industry data cited by News Corp. Tuesday.

According to comScore Media Metrix data, News Corp.'s Fox Interactive unit said the total of its pages viewed by the U.S. Web audience jumped to 39.5 billion in November from 38.7 billion in October.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's total pages viewed fell to 38.1 billion in November from 41.6 billion in October. Microsoft ranked third, falling to 17.9 billion in November from 19.3 billion.

Yahoo countered that it still had a larger audience, even though Fox sites won the top ranking for number of Web pages viewed. The company also has far more ads, and its customers spend more time, on average, on Yahoo than MySpace, it said.

Yahoo argued that it had lost the top spot in terms of page views because it increasingly uses the latest "Web 2.0" technology that did not need to spawn as many new pages to display Web information, a spokeswoman said.

Such technology is more effective for readers, she added.

Yahoo's audience measured 129.9 million unique visitors, compared with 57.2 million for MySpace.

Yahoo visitors also spent an average of 5.5 hours on the site in November, compared with 4 hours on MySpace, Yahoo quoted the comScore data as showing.

Citing data from ComScore Media Metrix, a division of comScore Networks, Fox Interactive said its ascent was driven by 200 percent year-over-year growth in page views for its popular social networking site, MySpace.

New video game console releases from Sony and Nintendo also spurred visits to Fox's video gaming site, IGN.com, the company said.