I would disagree. It doesn't seem like Naruto is taken nearly as serious as DBZ or even Pokemon to us back then.
I'm not saying it's not as popular, its just to me Naruto isn't in the forefront like DBZ was to us. Things like Adventure time, Regular show and Gumball, those crazy type of cartoons seem to have the most attention while back then DBZ pretty much ran the whole show for us since fighting/action cartoons and shows were what we were actually into. Today kids like a different type of entertainment, so Naruto has a different type of competition that DBZ didn't have to encounter