New Trends In Online Traffic

A customer at a cafe in San Francisco uses its wireless Internet access. Traffic at social-networking sites such as MySpace.com, which caters to young users, boomed in 2005. (By Justin Sullivan -- Getty Images)

The analysis showed that the Internet's biggest brands have plenty of staying power or at least are keeping pace with growth in the overall online population. Yahoo retains the largest audience in the United States, though its visitor growth slowed to about 5 percent last year.

Google was the only mega-site bucking the trend, with its users shooting up 21 percent in the past year. Not only has Google steadily expanded its share of the market for Web search, ComScore found, but it also has been attracting new users by expanding into other services offered by rivals, such as e-mail, mapping and personal publishing. If you combine traffic to all the properties it owns, including Blogger.com, Google's total audience jumped 27 percent last year, ComScore found.

The total audience for all of Time Warner's Internet properties, including AOL's various online services, showed little or no growth. Neither did the total audience for Microsoft Corp.'s collective Internet services, though some discrete services did well.

AOL's Mapquest.com, for example, pulled 7 percent more visitors in February this year compared with last.

One of the more dramatic growth stories was MySpace, which pulled 37 million visitors last month, 28 million more than a year ago. That gave it a ranking of No. 10 among all sites in the United States, according to ComScore.

Usage data for MySpace suggests an even higher popularity ranking: Based on total pages viewed and the time spent by each visitor, MySpace ranked No. 2 on the entire Internet, right behind Yahoo.

After Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million last summer, the site made headlines when some men were arrested and charged with assaulting girls they had identified on the site. Since then, News Corp. has been working feverishly to improve safety on MySpace by screening photos for pornography and removing profiles of underage users.

Joining MySpace on the fast track was Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Its traffic soared 275 percent last year following widespread media play over the posting of fake biographical material and similar controversies regarding the site's accuracy.

For a chart showing all top 50 Web sites and their number of visitors last month, go online tohttp://washingtonpost.com/technology.