In a blog post, Forssell says that Hulu set a new record for revenue in Q1, and that for the first time ever, Hulu users streamed over 1 billion videos in a single quarter. Coming of a year when subscription to Hulu Plus doubled, Forssell says that Hulu’s premium service topped 4 million subscribers in Q1.

Forsell also has this to say about where Hulu users are streaming content:

“Mobile viewing is growing at a significant rate and will account for approximately 15% of Hulu’s consumed videos in 2013-2014. For context, mobile viewing was nonexistent on our service only two years ago. Living room viewing is also growing; it currently accounts for 29% of Hulu’s content consumption, and 80% of Hulu Plus subscribers have watched with someone else.”

With stats out of the way, Forssell went on to announce two new Hulu original series, Quick Draw and East Los High. The former is “a comedic half-hour western set in 1875 that centers on a Harvard-educated sheriff and his quest to introduce the emerging science of forensics to an unruly Kansas town,” while the latter is an all-Latino cast English language drama set in an inner city high school.

These new series joins nearly a dozen Hulu exclusive series heading to the service this summer. Also, Hulu just launched new seasons of All My Children and One Life to Live.

Of course, much of this patting itself on the pack is a direct pitch to advertisers. Mainly, “Look! We have 4 million Hulu Plus subscribers who are paying to see your ads!”

“Our advertising mission is to be the world’s most effective video advertising service, and we are well on our way. According to comScore, Hulu is #1 in engagement among top ad supported sites. Hulu viewers stay with us for 45 minutes per session—without fast-forwarding or skipping ads. Hulu is also #1 in market share of all premium online video providers, delivering 1 in 3 of all premium video ads in the U.S. Our reasonable ad load drives the highest recall and awareness for brands, which results in higher effectiveness for the video ads,” says Forssell.

But it’s a strong pitch, especially for a company that is in a highly-competitive industry. The streaming video sector is booming, and Hulu is staying above the fray and setting records.

The previous high was set in May of 2012, when Wikimedia Foundation sites saw 492 million uniques. In March, the family of sites saw an astounding 517 million unique vistors. The data comes courtesy of the latest comScore Media Matrix.

“In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavor: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment,” says Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner.

“The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever – but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.”

The increase in uniques has also had an impact on how long readers stay and how much content they consume. Gardner says that people are staying longer and reading more.

“Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views. We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.”

Speaking of Sue Gardner – she’s not long for the position of Wikimedia director. A couple of weeks ago, she announced that she would be stepping down from the job – not right away, as she expects to take 6 months or so to find a replacement.

Apparently, Snapchat is processing more photos daily than Instagram. And not just more – nearly four times as many.

The figure was announced today by Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference put on by All Things D.

According to Spiegel, Snapchat is moving upwards of 150 million photos across the network every day. If you compare that to another popular photo-sharing service like Instagram, you find that Snapchat is moving a significantly more amount of total photos. Instagram currently boasts 40 million photos taken per day.

Of course, Instagram and Snapchat are very different services. Instagram is about long-lasting photos, ones that can be liked, commented upon, and browsed in a social networking frame. Snapchat, on the other hand, is a lot more focused on person-to-person communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with Snapchat, the premise is quite simple – but rather ingenious. Users can send short photos or videos to other users – self-deleting photos or videos being the most important aspect. Users can designate exactly how long they want the photo or video to stay viewable, after which time it will disappear. The app even notifies the sender if the recipient tried to make the communication more than ephemeral by taking a screenshot.

When it first launched, Snapchat defended itself against allegations that it was simply an app for sexting. On its face, it does appear like the perfect sort of app to send sexts without the fear of permanence. And believe me, I’m sure that there is plenty of that going on. But with 150 million photos taken daily, it’s clear that Snapchat is more a serious player and less of a niche sexting app.

Earlier this year, it became clear that Facebook saw Snapchat as a competitor when they released their “Poke” app. To say that the Poke app is heavily inspired by Snapchat is putting it the best way possible.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, they say that they see “more than 300 million photos uploaded every day.” By that figure, Snapchat is seeing nearly half of what Facebook sees every day. Now that’s incredible.

67 million are considered “monthly active listeners.”

“We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become. It is now clear that radio is changing, and that’s great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air,” said Founder TIm Westergren.

In celebration of the milestone, Pandora has released some interesting stats about the service:

• 200+ million songs streamed before 10 am every day, which totals out to about 8,000 songs streaming per second.
• 1.49 billion hours of music streaming in March (170,510 years worth).
• 400+ curated genre stations

Pandora last released some user stats back in January to celebrate the new year. In 2012, users streamed a total of 13 billion hours of music. If March, 2013′s numbers are to be repeated, we can expect Pandora to break this mark this year. They also saw a million+ songs froms over 100,000 artists and 1.6 billion total stations created in 2012.

Just a little over a month ago, Pandora was forced to do something “contrary to their mission” and put a 40-hour per month cap of free mobile listening – citing rising costs.

Here’s an infographic with some more figures from Pandora:

The Google property and most popular video site on the internet has just hit a billion unique users every month.

“In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences,” says YouTube.

“From the aspiring filmmaker in his basement and the next great pop musician, to the fans all around the world who tune in, subscribe and share their favorite videos with the planet, thank you for making YouTube what it is today. You have truly created something special.”

The only other comparable network would be Facebook, which has over a billion monthly active users.

When you think about a billion uniques in a month, the number itself is simply staggering. In just one month, about 10 Super Bowl-sized audiences watch at least one video on YouTube. If YouTube’s monthly unique audience were a country, it was be the third biggest country in the world (behind China and India).

Almost half of all people on the internet watches a video on YouTube each month.

Considering that there are about 6.9 billion people on Earth, 1 billion would represent about 14.5% of the entire world.

And the mind-blowing comparisons could go on and on. The point is simply this: YouTube is hands down one of the most ubiquitous presences in our lives.

In other YouTube-related billion view milestones, last December, viral smash “Gangnam Style” became the first video to ever break the 1 billion view milestone.

[Image via jm3, Flickr]

That’s the word from SXSW, where the company has announced that they can now boast 6 million paid subscribers. Back in December, Spotify announced that their paid subscriber total had hit 5 million. In July 2012, it was 4 million. And back in January of 2012, it was 3 million. If you do your math, you’ll notice that it took roughly a year for Spotify to turn 3 million in 5 million, but only 3 months to turn 5 million into 6 million.

Long story short: Spotify is growing faster than it ever has.

It’s not just paid subscriptions that are growing – total users are also up 4 million in the past three months, from 20 to 24 million. Of course, total users counts are great and all, but the big questions is how many unpaid users Spotify can turn into paid users with subscription-only features like mobile play, offline radio, and no advertisements.

Spotify has made a few non-subscriber based headlines in the past few months. Back in December, they made a splash when they acquired the catalog of Metallica, longtime foes of services like Napster. In the past three months, Spotify has landed on a bunch of new devices like TiVo, Roku, and Windows Phone 8.

And they just expanded the beta for their new web player in the U.K. The browser app should be making its way to the U.S. soon.

Well, it’s not even close.

According to a white paper from ComScore, Facebook accounts for 5 of every 6 minutes spent on a social networking site (83%). The next highest was Tumblr with 5.7%. Pinterest and Twitter command a very small amount, 1.9% and 1.7% respectively.

According to the report, Facebook leads in share of total time spent on the web with 10.8% – just over all Google sites with 10%. Google sites command the largest audience, however, with 191.4 million people in the U.S.

Long story short: it’s Facebook’s world, and all other social networks are just living in it.

[ComScore via CNET]

Broadband traffic analysts Sandvine is reporting that this year saw a return of the Super Dip, a phrase they coined last year to describe the plunge in internet traffic during the Super Bowl.

Sandvine looked at a sample of internet traffic across the eastern U.S. and saw that overall network usage was down roughly 15% during the Super Bowl. The biggest dip in Internet use occurred right at the game was getting underway.

But that doesn’t mean that web traffic was dead. Cordcutters made a significant impact on total traffic as CBS internet stream of the big game accounted for over 3% of total network traffic on Sunday evening.

Still,

“At Sandvine’s we’ve long maintained that the biggest screen is always the best screen to consume content, and for the Super Bowl it makes sense that most people would prefer to watch the game on their large HDTV. Since the only option to stream the game was via a web browser, getting the game streaming to their TV would have been a challenge for most people, so unsurprisingly viewers opted to tune in via their cable or satellite provider (in record numbers).”

Are you a fan of the “second screen,” in that you follow big television events like The Super Bowl or The Oscars on social media? Or do you find yourself forgetting about the internet when you have something big to hold your attention on the big screen?

But the top trend did. The top moment from last night’s spectacle, in terms of Facebook chatter, occurred when the Ravens won the game. The second most-talked-about moment was Beyonce’s halftime show, followed by the Superdome Blackout in third place.

Facebook says that mentions of Beyonce across the network started to rise around 8:00 pm ET, and by the time it was all over mentions of her name had increased over 49,000%. As soon as her former Destiny’s Child bandmates joined Beyonce on stage, mentions of “Michelle” and “Kelly” spiked 10,000%.

One of the most interesting spikes in popularity was the phrase “killed it,” which saw a 40,000% spike after Beyonce finished her performance. I guess we know how she was received by fans on Facebook.

And when the lights went out, mentions of the word “lights” skyrocketed (as you may expect) – 66,000%, to be exact.

As far as specific players go, Ray Lewis won the night with the most chatter. Following Lewis was Ravens QB Joe Flacco, who won MVP honors. Coming in third was 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick.

Here’s your complete top ten moment on Facebook from the big game last night:

1. Ravens win the Super Bowl
2. Beyonce’s halftime performance
3. Blackout in the Superdome
4. Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard kickoff return for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
5. Joe Flacco’s 56-yard pass to Jacoby Jones for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
6. Joe Flacco’s 13-yard pass to Anquan Boldin for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
7. Frank Gore’s six-yard run for a 49ers touchdown (and David Akers’ field goal kick)
8. Destiny’s Child surprise appearance with Beyonce during the half time show
9. Ray Lewis’ retirement
10. David Akers’ field goal kick from 27-yard line

And while you’re at it, check out what caused the second-most buzz online last night:

Long story short, your fast thinking mechanisms in your brain are always trying to parse out information as quickly as possible. This is fairly useful in day-to-day life. But sometimes, our fast thinking betrays us in its desire for speed. Slow thinking is what we need to use to solve certain problems.

But then again, slow thinking engagement can make you blind to a bunch of other stimuli out there in the world.

Basically, your brain is awesome and terrible. Have fun.

[AsapSCIENCE]