Online advertising remains strong, even as ad spending has decreased across other media, and MySpace has benefited from this trend with several large-scale campaigns from auto makers.  But in recent months, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in terms of monthly unique audience and stickiness: its monthly unique audience grew 177 percent in the last year compared to a 9 percent decrease for MySpace and time per person on Facebook went from 1 hour 8 minutes in March 2008 to 3 hours 16 minutes in March 2009.

When it comes to auto ads, MySpace continues to garner more overall ad spend: Honda, Chevrolet, Ford, Nissan and Toyota all recently ran ads, with the Honda Fit campaign generating more than 600 million ad impressions in the first quarter of 2009.  A year earlier, Toyota generated over 2.5 billion impressions for its Matrix.  This year, Toyota has allocated more of its ad dollars to Facebook.

As Facebook continues to grow, it will be interesting to track whether the automotive ad spending follows. To receive detailed monthly updates on the auto industry contact Julie Enzweiler