Actually this makes a lot of sense. As consumers choose to spend more time at home to save money, they need to be entertained. Over five million homes have broadband only connections meaning they aren’t paying for television programming. this is an increase of almost 23% since 2010. I think this also makes a lot of sense. Save some money, most content is available online somewhere. Sometimes you just have to wait a week or two to see your favorite show.

So that’s what Nielsen had to report. The internet just seems to get more popular every year and consumers continue to spend more on home entertainment like satellite, broadband, and wi-fi despite less than ideal economic conditions. It’s no surprise. As fuel gets more expensive, why not pay to bring the entertainment to you.

Microsoft’s website welcomed 93.8 million unique visitors from the U.S. in September 2011, more than any other computer and consumer electronics brand online during the month. Visitors spent an average of 42 minutes perusing the site. In comparison, Apple saw 68.7 million unique visitors but their they were more likely to spend more time on their site as the average visitor remained on their website for 62 minutes per visitor. “Adobe, Mozilla, and CNET rounded out the top five brands, with 24 to 28 million visitors going to their sites and spending 2 to 6 minutes each on average. CNET was the only news website among the top 5 in this category overall.”

Amazon had the third-highest amount of unique visitor traffic with 72 million unique visitors, each spending an average of 29 minutes on the site. Amazon was leaps and bounds the most visited mass merchandiser website, easily dwarfing the traffic for and time spent on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Overstock.com. Consumer traffic at Walmart “followed as the second-ranked site, where 34.5 million visitors spent an average of 13 minutes per person on the site. Target, Shopathome.com, and Overstock.com rounded out the top five most visited mass merchandiser websites.”

One stand-out factoid about Amazon: 1 in 3 people in the United States visited the site in September 2011.

Demographically speaking, women were more likely to both categories of websites. 3 out of 4 Internet savvy women visited consumer electronics sites during September 2011, compared to 7 out of 10 men. “Women were also 7 percent more likely to visit mass merchandiser sites. Young people aged 18-34 were slightly more likely than the general population (4 percent more likely) to visit consumer electronics sites.” Additionally, those in the middle income bracket were also more likely to visit computer and consumer electronics websites (guess that makes sense that they’d visit it more than low income consumers, and those 1%ers probably just hire people to do their comparative shopping for them).

Nielsen suggests that interested readers take a look at their State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report for additional insights about these consumer habits.

According to a new report released by the Nielsen people (who peek in your windows to see what you watch on TV), almost one in three U.S. households that have a television actually owns – wait for it – FOUR or more!

I am guessing that one is an HDTV hanging in the living room that they are still making payments on. Another is in the parents’ bedroom. One hooked to an older XBox in the kids’ room. Another is a monster CRT in the garage that still works but is hooked to nothing because Dad hasn’t yet bought that converter box and rabbit ears but doesn’t want to trash it and God knows no one will buy that dinosaur on Craigslist. /digression

290 million Americans owns at least one television. There are only 307 million people in the U.S., including babies and hobos. We are entertainment and information junkies.

And we don’t stop with TVs. We love smartphones, tablets, anything we can get our hands on.

211 million Americans are online (at home) and 116 million of us carry that web-access around with us mobile. And what do we do with all that access? I’m glad you asked.

In terms of smart phone use, it breaks down like this…

And, as far as the apps we use on our phones, here’s the skinny…

So, we got TV and we got Internet. And, we got them at the same time! Ain’t that just like a guy?

Nope, that’s just like a woman…

Don’t shoot the messenger. You know you do it.

If it’s any consolation to Facebook, they obliterated all other social networks and blogs this year. Blogger, Google’s blogging service, was a distant second to Facebook’s top-ranked social networking site with 45.7 unique visitors per month. Twitter trailed even further behind the two online services with 23.5 million unique visitors followed by another blogging service, WordPress.com, at 20.3 million unique visitors. One telling detail of this data about social networks is that Myspace.com – Myspace! – was the fifth top ranked social network/blog in 2011 with 17.9 million visitors – over twice as many unique visitors as Google+. Really, Google+, you couldn’t even keep up with Myspace? While Google may be the top web brand in the country this year, they’ve still got some distance to cover in the social networking arena.

Also, there’s this report from CNET earlier today that says that Google+ surpassed 62 million users. Something isn’t adding up. Granted, the CNET report says that a quarter of all Google+ users joined in December and the Nielsen data doesn’t include December, but that’s still a huge discrepancy in these numbers. Maybe Google’s fudging their numbers by synchronizing Google+ with Gmail accounts so that they can include Gmail users as Google+ stats. I mean, I technically am a Google+ user because I use Gmail but that doesn’t mean I actually use Google+ for anything. I don’t see how else these numbers can be so starkly different.

Google shouldn’t hold its gigantic G-shaped head too low, though, because they also dominated among online video providers this year. YouTube, Google’s video service, attracted 111.1 million unique visitors this past year. The closest any other video service came to that number was VEVO, who attracted 34.5 million viewers. One notable stat in this data set is that Netflix took the Elevator of Winning all the way down to the Basement of Losing because they eked into the last spot on this list with 7.4 million. They’re probably lucky they even showed up on this list after spending their totally fubar summer trying their very best not to admit to everyone, “Hey, look okay, we have no idea what we’re doing!” Given that the DVD and streaming service is now split and nobody really wants to pay twice as much for both services now, I bet Netflix doesn’t even show up on this list next year.

It’s probably a moot question to ask at this point, but is anyone even surprised by these rankings? When was the last time anyone even logged into a Myspace account? Watch this space this time next year to find out what 2012 does to shake up the hierarchy of online media titans.

Here’s a look at that complaint, courtesy of PaidContent:

Shortly thereafter, comScore countersued Nielsen and its Net Ratings division, claiming it was infringing upon its patents.

That whole mess is apparently over now (at least for the next few years), as the two measurement firms have settled. Nielsen and comScore put out a joint press release, which says the following:

Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN), a leading global provider of information and analytics around what consumers watch and buy, and comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the companies have settled their patent disputes.

This agreement settles both patent suits filed by the parties in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The top most-liked new ad was from Volkswagen, and its Passat ad featuring a little boy dressed as Darth Vader.

Here’s a look at the whole list:

The top most-remembered branded integration with a drama/sitcom was Purell and The Big Bang Theory from October 27, where Sheldon uses hand sanitizer after he puts a live snake into a desk drawer. Here’s that top ten list:

Finally, the top primetime program with product placement activity was American Idol, with 577 occurrences.

What was your favorite TV ad of the year? Let us know in the comments.

The top reason for adding a friend, according to their survey of nearly 2,000 adults, is knowing them in real life. Makes sense. The other reasons are interesting: 60% for mutual friends, 11% for business networks, 8% for physical attractiveness, 7% for increasing friend count (lame), 7% for friending everyone (lame), 7% for quality of photo, and 4% for their number of friends.

The top reason for removal is offensive comments. This is followed by: don’t know well (41%), trying to sell me something (39%), depressing comments (23%), lacking interaction (20%), political comments (14%), breakup/divorce (11%), don’t like their friends (8%), update profile too often (6%), they add too many people (6%), they don’t update enough (3%).

What’s your top reason for adding a friend? Removing a friend? Let us know in the comments.

The use of text messaging is highest among teens – particularly female teens – as well. Teens sent an average of 3,417 SMS/MMS messages per month in the third quarter of this year, with girls sending an average of nearly 200 more messages than boys.

Interestingly, voice usage is actually down among teens, who say they find messaging faster, easier, and more fun that voice calling. The study shows they used an average of just over 100 fewer minutes this year than in the same period last year.

These results are part of Nielsen’s broader State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report Q3 2011 (PDF). Another part of the study focused on smartphone ownership and app usage across various age groups. They found that the majority of people in the 18-24 (53%) and 24-34 (64%) age groups owned smartphones. Meanwhile 40% of the 13-17 age group owned smartphones, a number which surely contributed to the dramatic increase in data usage in the same age bracket. The study also found and that 62% of smartphone owners had downloaded apps within the past 30 days.

I think it goes without saying that having YouTube on Xbox is going to be pretty big for driving video views on the console.

Nielsen says streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. The firm just put out results from an October survey on the topic. Here’s a look at that:

“Streaming now represents a reported 14 percent of Xbox 360 time, 15 percent of PS3 time and 33 percent of Wii time. This growth is fueled by the availability of services like Netflix, Hulu, MLB Network and ESPN3,” it says.

How do you think the YouTube app will affect that on Xbox?

Here’s a particularly timely infographic about YouTube facts from social-media-training.co.uk:

by thedesignoven via

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Facebook dominates. And that’s across each age group surveyed. It’s certainly worth noting that Facebook is beating Google’s own products on its own operating system.

It beats out Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube (and yes, Google+), according to Nielsen’s numbers, though it does fall behind Google’s Android Market. Here’s how things shook out:

Facebook has obviously become a force to be reckoned with for any Internet company in terms of where users are spending their time online (including mobile). Facebook is also the top free app of the year in Apple’s App Store.

It really says something about Facebook’s power when it dominates Android use so much, even though Facebook’s Android app has been very buggy and often complained about. Facebook just finally released a new, better version of the app. It also says something about the trend of how people are consuming information.

“Apart from gaming, the 35-44 segment demonstrates a greater inclination to shop using the Amazon AppStore: 24 percent of them used the app in the last 30 days, while only 14 percent of those 18-24 did the same,” says Nielsen. “Groupon appeals more to those 25-34, not even making the top 20 ranking for those 18-24. A similar trend was found on Google+: active reach was higher for those 25 and older when compared to the 18-24 demographic.”

Nielsen ranked the apps by active reach, using percentage of Android owners who used the app within the past 30 days.