OPEN

Yahoo!’s not taking the claim by Hitwise that MySpace has overtaken it as a web destination in the US lying down.

It has said that the comparison looks at Yahoo!’s news, search and email sites separately:

"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 claim and counter-claim in this story exposes a range of differing opinions about how to measure and what to measure on the internet.

One blogger, Thomas Hawk, though also notes the awareness and close attention to blog conversations that Yahoo!’s PR agency Outcast is demonstrating:

But what is even more interesting to me in all of this is the savvy on Yahoo’s part in shooting me an email on this. Yahoo (or their PR firm at least) is obviously listening to what the blogosphere is saying about them and the fact that I published a tid bit on this earlier today they picked up on. It wasn’t even a main article but a small part in an article on GigaOm about social networking sites in general. Most likely OutCast Communications though is monitoring Technorati as to the Hitwise report today or saw something on Memeorandum, or is using Talkdigger or Blogpulse or some other tool.

Good to see PR firms adapting in this way.

Via Techmeme

Tags: outcast, yahoo, myspace, hitwise, measurement, analytics, web, PR, public relations