Reportr.net

While Facebook has been attracting the headlines recently and had the chattering classes talking, MySpace has quietly been growing in the UK.

Figures from Nielsen/Net Ratings showed that MySpace had 6.5m unique UK visitors in May 2007. This compares to 3.96m for Bebo and 3.2m for Facebook.

But there is a twist. MySpace may be leading the way in visitor numbers, but its social networking rivals are proving to be far more addictive.

People using Bebo spent an average of 152 minutes on the site. Those on Facebook devoted 143 minutes. But MySpace trailed with 96 minutes.

As the net matures, the industry is realising that just counting numbers such as page views can present a distorted view of a site’s popularity.

Nielsen/Netratings has adapted the way it ranks websites to take account of the average time per person and average number of sessions.

The aim is to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

It will be interesting to see how news sites stack up when it comes to time spent versus absolute page impressions.