MySpace vs. Facebook: Who’s Winning the Stats Battle?

These days, whenever News Corp. execs give public speaking appearances, the Facebook comparison slides are de riguer. Try as it might, MySpace just can’t get the little monkey (or 1,000-pound gorilla?) off its back.

The latest dustup? Some Hitwise figures announcing that MySpace had a 72% market share of US visits to social networking sites in December 2007 — well above Facebook’s 16% share.

TechCrunch jumped into the fray with some numbers from comScore showing that MySpace had 69 million US unique visitors in December vs. Facebook’s 35 million — giving it not nearly as big a lead as the Hitwise numbers indicate. In page views, TechCrunch reported, MySpace’s 38 billion trounced Facebook’s 13 billion.

TechCrunch also reported — breathlessly — that worldwide comScore figures showed that Facebook had surpassed MySpace in minutes spent on the site — 21 billion to MySpace’s 17 billion.

MySpace, meanwhile, sent out a press release touting the Hitwise numbers and figures from NetRatings (yet a third measurement service) showing that

“MySpace leads in the “Loyalty Matrix” (time spent per person combined with visits per person). During the month of December the average user spent over two hours and fifteen minutes on MySpace.”

A couple of things to note here: First, page views are a distorting metric. In a time when so many sites are using Ajax, they’re becoming less and less important as a measure of true activity.

Second, time spent is also a vague measure. For one thing, Facebook’s site has become one of the slowest loading sites around (thanks to all those apps cluttering people’s pages). And plenty of people keep Facebook open in one browser tab while they do other things online. So unless comScore’s numbers measure active engagement with the site (something the company is in fact working on), the time spent metric is also flawed.