MySpace is now the most popular site in the US - last week it overtook Google Search and Yahoo Mail as America's most visited website, according to Hitwise. MySpace had 4.46% of US visits for the week ending July 8th. What's more, MySpace is also winning market share from other social networks - in June, it captured 80% of social networking traffic, up from 76% in April. Facebook is second with 7.6%.

Clearly, MySpace was an absolute bargain when NewsCorp bought it for $580 million. What's more, Bebo's rejection of a $552 million offer sounds completely reasonable.

Update (12th July): Yahoo have contacted me and other bloggers to dispute the accuracy of Hitwise's claim. They point out that Hitwise compared MySpace to mail.yahoo.com, rather than all of Yahoo's properties. Taking all the domains together, they argue, Yahoo is still in the lead. Meanwhile, commenters have also suggested that I'm being overzealous in my valuations of social networks - I think they have a fair point.