Although there are a lot of 2012 video wrap-ups, this is probably the best and most fully-realized one I’ve seen so far – although it leans pretty heavily on sports, auto, and other feats of athleticism.

Here’s twelve and a half minutes of what everyone was watching for the past year. Buckle up:

[MiamiViceStyle via Gizmodo]

“Growth of highly-personal shopping categories like wedding goods and home decor was strong in 2012,” an Etsy spokesperson tells WebProNews. “Jewelry, our #1 category, is still hugely popular, but others, like clothing and housewares, are quickly gaining steam. Furniture was the fastest-growing category on Etsy this year, growing 134% year-over-year.”

Here are some more highlights from Dickerson’s post:

• Overall sales by the community in 2012 grew 70.3% over the previous year, to $895.1 million from $525.6 million in 2011.
• Sales in December 2012 were 72.9% higher than 2011 (compared to 69.9% from Dec 2010-Dec 2011).
• Sales in November 2012 sales increased by 74.9% over the previous year (compared to 65.7% from Nov 2010-Nov 2011).
• New buyers increased by 83% in 2012.
• 10 million new members joined Etsy last year, nearly doubling the total number of members to 22 million around the world, in nearly 200 countries.

Etsy will celebrate its 8th birthday this year. Since opening in 2005, the site has seen over 14 million shoppers buy over 100 million items.

Etsy has only made more moves in recent months to help its growth continue. Consider that it only laumched its iPad and Android apps in the last two months. The site also continues to expand into more languages.

Last week, Etsy announced its acquisition of Mixel.

The firm claims to detect over 90% of all new iOS and Android device activations on a daily basis, thanks to 260,000 apps which utilize Flurry Analytics. Based on its numbers, here’s what the day looked like compared to the average of the first 20 days of the month:

“In order to appreciate the magnitude of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December,” says Flurry’s Peter Farago in a blog post. “Over this period, daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%.”

Flurry also looked at app downloads on Christmas compared to the average of the first 20 days of December:

One very interesting thing the company found is that tablet activations were actually greater than smartphone activations. According to Flurry’s numbers, tablets beat out smartphones 51% to 49%, though for the first 20 days of the month, it was a much different picture at 20% to 80%.

“What was on Stumblers’ minds in 2012? We pulled data from our over 25 million members to see what was Stumbled the most and put our findings in an infographic posted below,” the company says. “Click each category or name to dive deeper. Who knows where you’ll end up next?”

Here’s 2012 in the Stumble-iverse:

2012 was a pretty big year for StumbleUpon, as it launched a major site redesign and introduced some new features core to the SU experience.

Yep, it really is the professional network.

The top 12 were:

1. The 8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees (Inc.)

2. What Successful People Do in the First Hour of Their Work Day (Fast Company)

3. Top Executive Recruiters Agree: There Are Only Three Key Job Interview Questions(Forbes)

4. The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time (Harvard Business Review)

5. What Recruiters Look at During the 6 Seconds They Spend on Your Resume (Business Insider)

6. Housing Crisis to End in 2012 as Banks Loosen Credit Standards (DS News)

7. Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs (The New York Times)

8. The Must-Have Job Skills of 2013 (The Wall Street Journal)

9. How Pinterest Is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media (Entrepreneur)

10. Why You Shouldn’t Accept a Counteroffer (U.S. News & World Report, via Yahoo News)

11. How Great Leaders Inspire Action (TED)

12. New Job Seekers Getting Asked Facebook Passwords (AP, via Yahoo Finance)

“Professionals gobbled up advice on how to be more efficient, more productive, and, yes, even more ‘remarkable‘ in the eyes of their bosses,” said LinkedIn’s Chip Cutter. “The self-help craze reflects, on some level, the realities of the economy. With the unemployment rate at 7.7%, and the economic recovery uncertain, businesspeople are looking for any edge they can find in the workplace.”

It’s interesting to see how much more business-oriented the list is compared to other year-end round-ups we’ve seen from social media services and search engines.

The data is based on the top 1,000 unfiltered search terms in the U.S. across over 60 search engines. It does not include mobile.

Four different variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10, accounting for 5.62% of searches overall (up 27% from last year). The top two terms stayed the same from year to year. Behind Facebook was “youtube” again at number two.

The top ten in 2011 were:

1. facebook
2. youtube
3. facebook login
4. craigslist
5. facebook.com
6. yahoo
7. ebay
8. www.facebook.com
9. mapquest
10. yahoo.com

For this year, the list looked like this:

1. facebook
2. youtube
3. craigslist
4. facebook login
5. facebook.com
6. yahoo
7. ebay
8. www.facebook.com
9. mapquest
10. amazon

Notice that “amazon” moved into the top ten for the first time.

Experian says that analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03% of the top 50 searches, an increase of 44% compared to 2011.

Google terms, including “youtube,” accounted for 1.91%, a 20% increase from last year. New terms that entered the top 50 included: backpage, cool math games, fox news, pinterest and pof (an acronym for dating site Plenty of Fish).

“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said Bill Tancer, GM of global research for Experian Marketing. “Single-word searches grew 16% in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”

The terms “yahoo” and “ebay” have been in the top ten since the ranking was started back in 2006.

Many of the hacks from 2012 actually made their way into Facebook proper as features that users have access to everyday. One such hack was a complete accident created by Facebook Engineer Pete Hunt. He was working on new photo viewer builds and accidentally created a full screen version. The Facebook team liked it enough to ship it to every user.

The other major hack that became part of Facebook proper was an Events calendar that kept track of all upcoming events. The calendar was created by Bob Baldwin and a few other members of the team and integrates posts, photos and videos. It shipped out to users in July.

Moving onto more of the extraordinary hacks, some Facebook team members painted a giant QR code that could be seen from space on the roof of one of the campus buildings. The code used to direct users to a job listing page for QR code painters, but now it goes to a page on how the code was created.

The last project that deserves specific mention involves an old friend – 3D printers. Benjie Holson, an engineer on the Timeline team, created a model of the world with spikes relative to how many people use Facebook in that area. The result is a neat 3D printed model that would look great on any modern artist’s portfolio.

Facebook will be holding a number of hackathons next year, and some of the projects will undoubtedly make their way into Facebook proper. It will be interesting to see Facebook and its hacking scene evolve through 2013.

Earlier, YouTube itself put out a year-end video reflecting on the site’s biggest hits of the year. It’s definitely a more light-hearted look back at 2012. I probably don’t have to tell you what to expect with that.

The stats released by YouTube today show the site is becoming more and more important to the news cycle in America and around the world. To illustrate that, the site boasts that 7,000 hours of news-related content is uploaded to YouTube daily. All of that content provides differing opinions, angles and sources to help viewers form a more educated opinion of world events than if they were to just watch one or two regular news channels.

As for the big news events of the year, YouTube rightfully points to Hurricane Sandy as being the major event of the year. In fact, 39,000 videos were uploaded in the week during the storm and the Weather Channel used YouTube to continuously live stream coverage of the storm for more than 70 hours.

The only thing that could compete with Sandy were the presidential election, and it did not disappoint. YouTube reveals that videos tagged Obama or Romney were viewed over 2.7 billion times during the election cycle. The debates also drew 27 million views on YouTube.

Other notable stories in 2012 that received millions of views included the conflict in Syria, the Red Bull Stratos Jump, the landing of the Mars Rover, and the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar took to the company blog today to announce that Hulu will close on 2012 with $695 million in revenue. He says it’s a 65 percent increase over last year, and it shows that Hulu is growing even faster than before.

The revenue growth can be partially attributed to the continued success of Hulu Plus. The company now has over 3 million subscribers which is double the subscribers it had at the end of last year. The bump in subscribers can be attributed to two main causes – Hulu Plus is now available on more devices than ever before, and the service is pulling solid numbers in Japan.

Kilar notes that Hulu Plus was released on Apple TV, Wii, Wii U, Windows 8 tablets and Android devices all in 2012. Combine that with the existing apps on Xbox 360 and PS3, and you have a service that’s available to pretty much everybody. The expanded set of streaming options definitely help to attract more subscribers.

Any streaming service is only as good as its content, and Hulu Plus made good over the past year in content acquisitions. Kilar says that the company has expanded its offerings on Hulu and Hulu Plus by over 40 percent this year. That means that the service is now home to over 60,000 TV episodes and 2,300 TV series. A lot of TV series are also available soon after they air on television which makes Hulu a more attractive option compared to the likes of Netflix and Amazon.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the online streaming business evolves over the next year. Hulu has proven itself to be a major player in the arena, and the company could go into a myriad of directions in pursuit of more subscribers and advertising dollars.