New iPod owners swarmed to Apple’s iTunes store Christmas day, dramatically increasing iTunes’ market share. Visits to the iTunes website jumped 413 percent this Christmas compared to last year, according to Hitwise, a marketing intelligence company.

While some are reporting that holiday traffic brought down iTunes, the site’s biggest problem appeared to be very slow response times caused by the millions of new iPod owners registering their new music players or downloading music. Apple will need to increase its capacity to handle the huge growth in traffic, which was about 70 times the year to year growth seen by most online retailiers.

Hitwise also reports that visits to iTunes outnumbered visits to Microsoft’s Zune.net 30 to 1.

“For the third holiday season in a row, the iPod has been the must-have Christmas gift,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. “Competitive offerings have not yet succeeded in capturing the attention of music listeners, and the surge in visits to the Apple Store shows that iPod owners are also engaged in filling and accessorizing their new devices.”

The market share of visits to the Apple Store showed an increase of 110 percent since 2005. The Apple Store was the fourth most visited website in the Hitwise Retail Index on Christmas Day 2006.

The average daily increase in visits to the Hitwise Retail Index for the 2006 online holiday shopping season (Thanksgiving Day through the Thursday before Christmas) versus the same period in 2005 was 5.9 percent. The days with the largest individual increases over the same day in 2005 were Cyber Monday and Thanksgiving Day. Visits to the Retail 100 Index were up 13.2 percent on Monday, November 27, 2006 versus Monday, November 28, 2005 and up 11.8 percent on Thursday, November 23, 2006 versus Thursday November 24, 2005.