1. MySpace—51 million
2. Classmates.com sites—15 million
3. Facebook—14 million
4. YouTube—13 million
5. MSN Spaces—10 million
6. Xanga—7 million
7. Flickr—5 million
8. Yahoo 360—5 million
9. LIVEJOURNAL.COM—4 million
10. MYYEARBOOK.COM—3 million

One of my high school teachers (history) once said: there is the truth, lies and statistics. I also heard the same joke with Accounting replacing Statistics. Reason why both can be interchanged is because the outcomes largely depend on what rules and methodologies are applied. They might ask you: "What do you want the numbers to be?"

comScore Networks a US based company now announced that they got it right for the first time representing 99% of the world Internet population and they counted 694 million users in March. If their numbers are indeed right, then two other organizations need to go over their books since they claim widely different results unless they have - as might be expected - actually measured something different. Nielsen/Netratings counts 317 million and CNNIC from China only 110 million. So what numbers do you want it to be, I am sure it can be statistically backed...

Now as of Europe there are Germany (31 million, rank 4), UK (30, 5), France (23, 7), Italy (16, 9), Spain (12, 12), The Netherlands (11, 13), Russia (11, 14) in the 15 top list. India (rank 10) has 16 million and China (rank 2) already 72 million still behind the US with 152 million.

Some other - probably more for psychologists/shrinks - interesting (and alarming?) numbers are the total amount of hours spent on the Internet: Israel, Finland and South Korea are leading here. In all three cases I believe I know the reasons. But as a shrink might say when time is up: "Let's delve into that next time..."