Newspaper websites attracted an average monthly unique audience of 72 million visitors in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing 37 percent Internet users.

The figures come from a custom analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.  Newspaper websites users generated more than 3.2 billion page views during the quarter, spending more than 2.4 billion minutes sites.

In May, children aged 2-11 consisted of nearly 16 million, or 9.5 percent of active Internet users, according to a new report from Nielsen Online.

Apple was the top hardware manufacturer site in May 2009, with 55.7 million unique visitors and an average time spent per person of 1 hour and 14 minutes, according to a new report from Nielsen Online.

Excitement surrounding the new iPhone 3GS sent blog mentions up 1,226 percent week-over-week on June 8, the day of the announcement. After the initial announcement, buzz dipped but picked up again after the phone became available on June 19, with blog mentions more than doubling compared to the prior week.

Update: Hulu is reportedly critical of the latest ranking it has received from Nielsen Online.

Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, while comScore said there were 42 million. There were 373 million videos viewed on Hulu in April, up from348 million in March. Even though the number of videos viewed was up, Nielsen said unique visitors to Hulu had declined from 9.5 million in February to 8.9 million in March to 7.4 million in April.

The ten most heavily used Web brands in the UK have it pretty good.  Insanely good, as a matter of fact.  A new report from Nielsen Online indicates that these ten brands (which were looked at along with 7,625 others) account for 45 percent of all UK Internet time.

CBS Interactive appears to be in rather great shape.  A report from Nielsen Online documented traffic trends for many of its properties during April, and increases of more than 20 percent were common across the board. 

Nielsen Online has released online VideoCensus data for the month of March. YouTube not surprisingly, is still on top in both total streams and unique viewers.

The ranking of brands by total number of video streams goes like this:

1. YouTube (5,479,609)
2. Hulu (348,520)
3. Yahoo! (231,795)
4. Fox Interactive Media (207,528)
5. Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network (196,160)
6. ABC.com (176,931)
7. MSN/Windows Live (168,907)

Nielsen Online has announced the January search share rankings for the U.S., and, well, you know the drill: Google’s first, Yahoo’s second, and Microsoft’s third.  But there were slight twists this time in that Google didn’t make much headway and Microsoft achieved some solid gains. 

There was a 16 percent year-over-year increase in unique visitors to the top 10 newspaper Web sites, growing from 34.6 million unique visitors in December 2007 to 40.1 million in December 2008, according to Nielsen Online.

NYTimes.com was the top online newspaper in December 2008, with 18.2 million unique visitors. USATODAY.com took the number two spot with 11.4 million and washingpost.com landed in the three spot with 9.5 million unique visitors.

More people will continue to choose to buy their gifts online this holiday season, citing convenience, time saving and price as the primary reasons for shopping on the Internet, according to a new survey from Nielsen Online.

More than half (53%) of consumers say price is the reason to buy online, compared to 46 percent last year. Convenience is also a major factor for shopping online with 76 percent of consumers citing the ability to shop 24 hours a day and 74 percent saying it saves them time when they shop online.

Younger Internet users between the ages of 12-17 years old are accustomed to less online advertising on the Web sites they visit than adults of all ages, according to a new report from Nielsen Online.

An analysis of online advertising clutter found that Internet users 65+ were exposed to the most clutter, while children 2-11 experienced the least.

Since Web sites geared towards children have little to no advertising, it is not unusual that the youngest Web site visitors are usually exposed to a low level of advertising clutter.

Nielsen Online has released data regarding the August search market, and certain persistent trends were defied in small ways.  But a really interesting deviation popped up as the overall number of searches fell.

Nielsen Online has released some new numbers concerning social networks, and things aren’t looking too great for MySpace.  While the News Corp property is still ahead of Facebook in terms of unique audiences and the length of users’ sessions, the one stat has leveled off and the other has fallen.

With the first week of the 2008 Beijing Olympics completed, Nielsen Online has released a report on how fans around the globe used the Internet to follow the games.

Fans in 10 countries visited Beijing2008.cn, the official web site of Beijing games, at a rate of 930,000 per day, with traffic surpassing one million unique visitors on a number of days, as they searched for Olympic results, news and video.

Numbers reflecting traffic to NBC’s Olympics-related sites have been released, and despite protests about Tibet and time delays, they’re looking rather impressive.  The one problem, as far as NBC’s concerned: Yahoo’s numbers appear to be even better.

U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps is having success in the Beijing Olympics that has led him to be the most talked about Olympic athlete on the Internet according to Nielsen Online.

The Internet plays an increasingly essential role in retail for brick and mortar retailers, even for purchases made in-store according to a new survey from Nielsen Online.

People who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick and mortar store, 80 percent bought from a store whose Web site they visited first. In addition 53 percent purchased from a retailer on whose Web site they had spent the most time.

The New York Times says that Google News, Google’s semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth:

… traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.

Avid fans of technology are more assertive and are likely to be leaders according to a recent online study from Mindset Media and Nielsen Online.

The study looked at the characteristics of 25,000 U.S. adults and found fans of technology scored higher in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness but had low levels of modesty. According to the study, these traits are not driven by age, gender or income.

Earlier this year, several research companies recorded a decrease in traffic to Facebook, and all sorts of people began to characterize the site as a passing fad.  Then it turned out Facebook had experienced similar dips before, and the talk subsided.  This time, Facebook might not be so lucky.

New stats show that Wikipedia isn’t growing nearly as fast as it used to.  The number of unique U.S. visitors to the site increased by an amazing 7,900 (or so) percent over the last five years, however, and Wikipedia seems to owe search engines for its continuing popularity.

At some point, we’ll be able to start recycling these reports; "Google is ahead" can only be said so many ways.  February wasn’t too routine, though, as Nielsen Online reports that Google gained 1.8 percent market share in comparison to its January standing.