MySpace layouts is now the world’s 9th most popular search term, according to the latest data coming out of Hitwise. We’ve already seen how huge the market is around feeding the MySpace beast (creating Flash widgets for social networking profiles), but MySpace layouts are also a massive driver of traffic. In fact, these sites are growing at about the same rate as MySpace itself - while the market share of visits to MySpace increased by 60% over the last 6 months, visits to the Hitwise “Web Development” category have increased by 57% over the same period. The top sites are no doubt making big bucks from their ad-supported business models.

Designers will also be overjoyed to learn that 9 of the top 10 web development sites in the world create MySpace layouts and flashing gifs. Additionally, it’s interesting to note that the top players are not simply those that have the highest Google ranking for “MySpace Layouts” (although there is some correlation).

So who are the big winners here? I thought I’d do a quick, easy-to-read, fun-for-all-the-family round up of the Top 10 companies in this booming sector. The following are ranked by market share.

FreeWebLayouts

The number one player, FreeWebLayouts, serves up fairly attractive off-the-shelf layouts. They’ve also made the process incredibly simple - click on any profile you like and you’ll instantly get some code to paste into your MySpace page. Popular backgrounds tend to include celebrities and movie imagery. It strikes me that this could be a huge opportunity for the movie studios: pay FreeWebLayouts to create and distribute a layout for your movie right before it comes out in theaters. It would be a cheap grassroots effort and could generate a large amount of buzz.

FreeWebLayouts also has a profile creator that lets users develop their own customized MySpace layouts - not to mention the hundreds of buttons, banners and add-ons that are available. Obviously all these elements will all link back to FreeWebLayouts when inserted into your MySpace profile - resulting in masses of traffic from MySpace.