YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 912.5 million videos, representing 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft sites landed in the third spot with 623 million (2.2%), trailed by Yahoo sites with 455 million (1.6%) and Turner Network with 318 million (1.1%).

More than 174 million viewers watched an average of 161 videos per viewer during the month of February. Google sites attracted 132.2 million unique viewers during the month (93.9 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo sites with 53.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and CBS Interactive with 45.3 million viewers (6.4 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 23.3 videos during the month, representing another all time high for the property.

In February, Tremor Media ranked as the leading video ad network with a potential reach of 81.7 million viewers, or 46.9 percent of the total video viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 75.5 million viewers (43.3% penetration) followed closely by Advertising.com Video Network with 74.8 million viewers (42.9%).

Other key findings from comScore include:

*83.1% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

*132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube (89.5 videos per viewer).

*The length of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
 

To look at them alphabetically, let’s start with BNET, a site for professionals.  It saw 17 percent more unique visitors in June than May.  Even more interestingly, BNET recorded 97 percent more visits and a 102 percent rise in minutes spent on the site.

Next, if a few sites can be clustered together, there’s the CBS Sports group.  According to a formal statement, these sites "reported healthy year-over-year gains across all properties: CBSSports.com registered a 23% increase in unique users and a 21% jump in visits, CBS College Sports Network increased 22% in minutes and 15% in visits while MaxPreps.com gained 162% in unique users."

Then comes CBS.com, which upped its unique user count by 45 percent.  Visits were up by 96 percent, and minutes went in the same direction by a margin of 90 percent.

CHOW, a food site, gets the following spot in the lineup, and users did indeed eat it up in a figurative sense.  Unique visitor and visit stats increased by 35 and 60 percent, respectively, on a year-over-year basis.

Moving on, there’s CNET, and considering that it’s already rather huge, this property performed well, recording year-over-year growth of 10 percent in terms of unique users and 25 percent in terms of visits.

Gamespot comes next, and it saw 14 percent more users in June than the previous month.  Visits went up by 38 percent during the same period, and 74 percent more minutes were spent on the site.

Finally, TheInsider.com, an entertainment and gossip site, also saw positive numbers, posting month-over-month growth of 21 percent, 44 percent, and 82 percent with respect to unique users, minutes, and visits.

Yahoo filed the suit June 1 in federal court in Minneapolis. The company alleges the NFL Players Association threatened to sue it if it did not pay royalties for using the publicly available information.

"Yahoo, like other fantasy-football game providers, tracks, compiles and posts NFL player statistics," Yahoo said in the suit.

The NFL Players Association gave the National Football League Players Inc. the "exclusive worldwide rights" to license the player’s biographical information, according to the suit.

Yahoo said in the suit that in previous football seasons it licensed the information from the NFL Players Inc. That agreement expired in March, and Yahoo is citing a similar case in which a judge ruled in favor of CBS Interactive allowing it to use player’s statistics without paying royalties.

Between 13 million to 15 million people take part in fantasy football games that gross more than $1 billion annually.
 

First up alphabetically is CBS.com, which experienced a 20 percent month-over-month gain in terms of unique users, a 24 percent bump in visits, and another 24 percent rise in minutes.  Next comes CBSNews.com, which saw a slightly better 23 percent increase in its number of unique users.

CNET posted bigger percentages still on a year-over-year basis; gains tied to unique users, visits, and minutes were 34 percent, 38 percent, and 32 percent, respectively.  This helped the site remain the top destination within its category.

Then, Last.fm managed to achieve year-over-year growth in unique users of 68 percent on top of a 67 percent jump in minutes and a 39 percent rise in visits.

That leaves just TV.com.  "The place where television lives online," as CBS Interactive likes to call the site, experienced a 39% year-over-year increase in unique users and a 29% year-over-year increase in visits.  Which seems particularly impressive given Hulu’s gains in the same space.

The new feature is called Social Viewing Rooms and is available for primetime, daytime, and CBS Classics. Social Viewing Rooms allows TV fans to chat, make comments, and or animate customized virtual objects on the screen.

Users will be able to find, make friends with, and have conversations with others who are fans of CBS programming. Viewers will see a list of everyone else in the room, and can chat with any or all of them directly during the show.

CBS says it Social Viewing Rooms forms a key part of its interactive division’s goal to engage TV fans online while adding a social dimension to the online viewing experience.

The company says that over time it will expand the Social Viewing to other CBS Interactive properties.

"The Web offers a unique opportunity to do more than just rebroadcast entertainment content," said Anthony Soohoo, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Entertainment at CBS Interactive.

"The CBS.com Social Viewing Room is a next-generation social media platform that lets users engage with each other and the content they are watching in a fun new way, while at the same time giving advertisers an opportunity to connect with this engaged audience."

"This is part of our strategic plan to open CBSNews.com to diverse news, analysis and voices from across the Web," Michael Sims, CBSNews.com’s vice president of editorial content, said in a statement from the company. "We are simultaneously exposing our content to the greater Digg community to help encourage more discovery and sharing."

Why is this strange?

Well, according to this unofficial study, 70% of Digg users are under the age of 14 and cannot legally vote!

Out of a sample of 7,298 Digg users, an overwhelming 69.94% are under the age of 14 years old.

Yes, it appears that CBS is willing to let kids influence who becomes the next President of the United States of America! Expect to see a close race between Steve Jobs and Nintendo Wii!

Comments

No official link between those two events has been made; we cite them as they happened chronologically. However, we have noticed CBS pulling a little sleight of hand with this unhappy change.

On December 14th, the former production team posted this message on StarTrek.com’s News section:

Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team

Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.

We don’t know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years.

If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com – we hope someone at CBS will read them.

Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.

When we contacted CBS for a comment about this change, we received a statement about the changes being planned within StarTrek.com by CBS Interactive. The text of the statement also appears on StarTrek.com at this link.

The URL from that link is the same URL that contained the farewell message from the production team, the message we reproduced earlier. That earlier post has been cached in Yahoo’s search engine, and we have kept a copy too.

CBS Interactive has full rights to do as it wishes with its site and its employees. The right to do something doesn’t always fully consider the wisdom of doing so.

It’s obvious from the earlier post the entire team had been fired on short notice. Was Strike Trek the catalyst for this change?

People tend to not burn bridges in Hollywood, so we’ll likely never know. Unless they post something in the comments below (hint hint).

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"CBS is all about open, nonexclusive partnerships," CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith said. He added that CBS. com is not the answer to reaching viewers so the network is going where the viewers are instead of making them go to CBS.com.

The network currently has partnered with 24 sites including TV.com, Comcast’s The Fan, Slingbox and Brightcove to provide video clips and other CBS content according to Multichannel News.

The CBS partnerships have paid off with unique viewership to CBS.com increasing from 21 million unique visitors per month in May to 134 million currently.

CBS has also purchased all possible keywords, such as series, stars names, to maximize search results for their fall line up on numerous sites said Patrick Keane, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of CBS Interactive.

Smith said CBS had to do something different to promote their online content and it could not be the same as what they do with television. "We have to do something cool," he said.

Through the online properties and social application providers, users can incorporate CBS clips into their profiles, Web sites, blogs, widgets, wikis’s and community pages. This will allow users to personalize content and share it with others.

"Today, we are taking the CBS Audience Network directly to the user," said Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive.  "In launching the CBS Audience Network we solidified our position as the most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web thanks to our great video distribution partners."

" We now want to empower our audience to be creative and deepen their experience with our content by allowing them to share and embed CBS-provided clips to their blogs, wikis, widgets, community sites and whatever else gets thrown our way.  We are delighted to have so many quality partners – established and start ups – helping to bring CBS content to the online community."

The new online partners of the CBS Audience Network include: Automattic, Clearspring, DAVE Networks, Goowy Media, meebo, MeeVee, Musestorm, Ning, RockYou!, Slide, VideoEgg, Voxant and vSocial