Facebook is now nearly twice as big as its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace, Michael Arrington reports. In December, the social networking leader drew 222 million unique users, according to comScore, at a 10.8% month over month gain. More than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet in December went to Facebook. Arrington points out that Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which after adding 4 million new users in December had 125 million members total. Facebook also had twice the number of page views in December: 80 billion versus 43 billion for MySpace. …

As one of her first moves since joining Yahoo as CEO, Carol Bartz froze annual pay raises as the Web giant tries to cope with a declining display advertising market. According to Bloomberg, the freeze doesn't affect Yahoo's annual bonus program and some workers, including those who get promoted. Bartz took over as CEO earlier this month, replacing Jerry Yang. Faced with a contracting economy, Bartz is looking for ways to fuel growth at Yahoo after Yang walked away last year from several takeover offers for the company from Microsoft Corp. In early Friday trading, Yahoo was priced at $11.08. …

Big media companies simply don't know what to do with YouTube. Should they get in bed with the Web's largest video company, or sue it for copyright infringement? YouTube, for its part, offers content providers a cut of ad revenues when their videos are uploaded to the site, regardless of who puts them there. So far, most of the ad revenue they've generated from YouTube has come from contextual overlays sold and served up by the Google video site. This is mostly because very few media partners are able to sell their own ads on YouTube, but, according to TechCrunch, …

One way for Apple to get investors' minds off of Steve Jobs is to deliver a banner quarter, which is precisely what the consumer electronics giant did on Wednesday. Thanks to much stronger than expected iPod sales, Apple delivered fourth quarter sales that rose 6% to $10.17 billion, while profit increased to $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per share, beating the average analyst estimate of $1.39. As BusinessWeek says, "Headlines like that could make it easy to forget temporarily that the U.S. is in the throes of a recession and consumers and companies are reining in spending on consumer electronics." IPod …

EBay disappointed investors with lukewarm fourth quarter earnings, delivering sales of $2.04 billion versus an average forecast of $2.12 billion. As GigaOm's Om Malik points out, it was nice to see Skype, eBay's communications division, continue to show signs of growth. Nevertheless, he says, the same questions hang over the Voice-over-Internet Protocol provider: How does Skype help eBay, and how long can it sustain growth? For the quarter, Skype had sales of $145 million, up 26% year over year, but only $2 million higher than the previous quarter. The service grew by 35 million new members, bringing its total member …