Bebo Use Tops MySpace In UK

Oh, the horror! Say it ain’t so!

It’s so. No longer the dominant social network of the US and UK, MySpace relinquished its crown to Bebo in July 2007 (at least in the Kingdom), which claimed an advantage of roughly 600,000 unique visitors over R. Murdoch’s own Web-based social phenom. ComScore, the source of the latest figures, has stated that Bebo ended the first month-long stretch of Q3 with 10.7 million uniques, landing atop MySpace’s 10.1 million for the first time.

For those interested, Facebook came in behind both entities with 7.6m individual visitors of its own.

As unsubstantive as this news might be, market stats and figures are a driving force that many use to track the so-called health of a business relative to competitors or its industry as a whole. That, or it’s really just interesting for some to see where things are headed.

In any case, this factoid brings with it some perspective, showing that MySpace can no longer sit comfortable knowing that numerous companies are now eagerly nipping at its share of the pie. The company still reigns supreme where individual accounts are concerned, but the presumption that many existing users of social services around the net may be creating additional accounts for personal or even professional purposes - on MySpace especially - shows that a site’s registered membership is only part of a larger (and growing) picture. MySpace may have 60+ million registered users, and Facebook and Bebo may clock in at roughly 30 million members each, but the makeup of each network is becoming increasingly complex, so much so that numbers must tallied from all angles by numerous sources to make solid and logical sense of the construction of what are now clearly very immense services on the Web.

If anything, the increased visitorship of Bebo means the site will be reaching (by “word of mouth”, no doubt) outside Europe to expand its business more than ever in the coming months/years. It is currently as robust and multifaceted as most any social network with roots in the US, and the connection it managed to forge with Apple and iTunes some time back might turn out to be one of its strongest selling points in the near future for potential American users.

The battle between the major social networks of the world is becoming an increasingly fascinating one, is it not?