MySpace is about to lose its position as no. 1 social-networking site for US users, as rival Facebook strides ahead. MySpace has 70 million monthly US uniques (Comscore, March 2009). Meanwhile, Facebook has surged to 61 million US users and is adding a few million more every month.

According to TechCrunch worldwide monthly page views for MySpace have declined from 47.4 billion a year ago to 38 billion today, a 20 percent drop. In the same period Facebook has grown from 44 billion to 87 billion, a near 100 percent increase.

MySpace has seen a 16 percent year-on-year drop in page views, from 41.6 billion to 34.8 billion (Comscore, April 2009). Facebook has grown from 13 billion to 20 billion page views per month.

TechCrunch has declared the war over: "MySpace is a battleship that's going in the wrong direction at high speed. It's hard to turn a battleship. Perhaps even impossible in this case," writes TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

"In about a year from now MySpace will receive their last welfare payment from Google, and they'll be on their own. They'll have a social network that costs half a billion dollars a year to run.

"With page views decreasing and the Google money gone there is a strong likelihood that the News Corp. subsidiary will be unprofitable a year from now. Revenue of $800+ million last year could easily decrease to well below half a billion dollars, and likely will."

This story, "Facebook Wins the Social Network War" was originally published by PC Advisor (UK) .