That’s 10 billion views, and that’s just counting Web surfers from the U.S. Factor in international visitors and…it would be a lot bigger.

The rest of the rankings look about the same as they as they always do–puny compared to Google’s (GOOG) status. That is, if you add up the next nine biggest sites, they won’t come close to matching YouTube’s share. But for the record, Hulu gained share but lost a position to Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, its corporate cousin from News Corp (NWS). And Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL replaced Disney’s (DIS) ABC at the bottom of the rankings. Click table to enlarge:

Yet another reason it’s amazing that it took Warner Music Group nine months to hammer out a deal to get its video back on YouTube–and bear in mind that they’re not there yet. If you’re in the music video business and you pull your videos off the world’s biggest video site, you had better have a very good reason for doing so.

In other shocking news: This movie is 12 years old. That’s older than Google!

Quote from CEO Rupert Murdoch: “Our results for the quarter are a direct reflection of the grim economic climate. While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer lasting than previously thought. As a result, we have been taking actions to preserve a solid level of operational profitability and a strong balance sheet without sacrificing future growth. We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate. We believe our businesses are well positioned to withstand a lengthy downturn and to emerge stronger as the current economic situation improves.”

News Corp. (NWS) knocked down guidance for the rest of its fiscal year (which ends this summer) again: Last fall it had said it would expect operating income to drop to the low- to mid-teen range for FY ’09; today it says it’s planning on a 30 percent decline.

Excluding the write-down, the company posted earnings of 12 cents a share on revenue of $7.9 billion; Wall Street had been looking for 19 cents and $8.39 billion, respectively. Including the charge, the company lost $6.4 billion, or $2.45 a share.

Murdoch’s comments about things being worse than he thought should be more worrisome than similar quotes we’ve heard from other media CEOs. That’s because Murdoch has been one of the most bearish of moguls since last spring. And last fall, he began guiding down expectations again.

But the market seems to be taking all of this in stride, and News Corp. shares were up slightly in aftermarket trading. Either investors are relieved that things aren’t worse or they are encouraged by Murdoch’s remarks, which were peppered with both pledges to cut costs and an optimistic refrain that things will get better one day.

Here’s the breakdown of the company’s operating performance–note the huge drop in the company’s TV business (click to enlarge):

MySpace/Fox Interactive Media falls under “other.” Here’s some more info on that from the release: “The decline in FIM operating results was driven by increased costs associated with the growth in unique users, international expansion, the launch of MySpace music and new features, as well as lower subscription revenue at IGN.”

Update from the call: FIM revenues of $226 million are down three percent year-over-year, due to lower subscription rates at IGN, the game-centric business News Corp. bought around the same time as MySpace in 2005. The good news: MySpace ad revenues are flat compared to last year, which is pretty good, considering the rest of the Web.

Asked about his views on the Web as an ad medium in general, Murdoch gave a nuanced but fairly mainstream take: It’s great to sell search ads, but the rest of the online ad business is plagued by an “almost infinite increase in inventory” which keeps pushing rates down. On MySpace: “In the social-network area, we’re getting 80 to 90 percent of total revenue, but that is not a particularly relevant number….We need to find new ways to monetize our huge audience.”

The breakdown on the write-off:

$4.6 billion on “indefinite-lived intangibles (primarily FCC licenses)”
$3.6 billion of goodwill
$185 million on “Newspapers and Information Services fixed assets”

Still reading? Then you should know that Murdoch still doesn’t want to buy the New York Times: “I’ve got no interest. I’ve got no desire to be an even bigger public enemy. Or target.”

What changed? According to News Corp.:

• The U.S. dollar has gotten stronger, which makes the performance of the company’s many businesses  less valuable.
• The markets for local TV advertising in the U.S. and newspapers around the world are awful.
• The overall economy is lousy.

And yes, that lousy economy is going to affect the Web, too. (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones, is also the owner of this Web site.)

News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media unit (basically MySpace and a few other sites) recorded a 17 percent gain, driven by a 16 percent jump in display advertising. Those are fine numbers given the performance of other big Web players–just ask Yahoo (YHOO) or Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL–but they’re down from 57 percent growth in the last quarter. And they’re not going to let the unit hit the 30 percent growth goal the company laid out this summer. Asked to throw out a new target, COO Peter Chernin demurred.

Instead he described the business in general terms: Starting to hurt, but not as much as the competition. Transcript from Seeking Alpha:

We started off this quarter also feeling good. We are beginning to be honest to see some softening at the end of this calendar year and looking into the first couple of quarters, the beginning next year.

I still believe that we’re doing slightly better than the marketplace. But it’s clear from everybody else that there is a lot of softening in the display advertising marketplace and we are beginning to feel some of that. So I think still from our own sort of anecdotal appraisal of the business, we are pleased with the progress they are making.

We think a lot of areas, the launch of MySpace Music, the launching of SelfServe Ads, the increase in the quality and number of advertisers etcetera. We are pleased with their progress, but we are just beginning sort of December and then moving into January to begin to see some of the softness in the marketplace catch up to us.”

Attention New York publishers and advertisers!!!

Those people pestering you to vote for “Roi Asap” today? They’re not working for a real candidate!

This warning comes to you from a MySpace worker bee, who is up in arms about a promotional stunt from the MySpace ad sales team.

“Roi,” you see, is a semi-clever pun based on a term MySpace ad chief Jeff Berman used in a press release promoting the targeting technology last month (as in, “Return On Investment”).

MySpace is supposed to hire dozens of fake campaign workers to push Roi/advertising targeting today at midtown offices in Manhattan.

I don’t see the problem here. But the MySpace employee thinks the fake vote-soliciting is “ridiculous” and wants it “exposed.” Okay, done.

More interesting will be quarterly earnings call from MySpace owner, News Corp., on Wednesday afternoon, and what CEO Rupert Murdoch has to say about his prize Web property’s recent performance.

News Corp. (NWS) earnings calls are always entertaining, but Wednesday’s call should be more intriguing than most. It will be the first time Murdoch has sounded off in a public forum, since the economy went into free-fall.

Murdoch had already sounded the alarm bells last spring. And, at the D: All Things Digital conference in May, he predicted that the U.S. would be in an 18-month recession.

More recently, during the company’s August earnings call, he said that local television ads had fallen off a cliff. (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones, is also the owner of this Web site.)

But even as Murdoch has predicted gloomy times for some of his company’s assets, he and his execs have talked up the prospects of MySpace. During the last call, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin said Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. Web unit dominated by MySpace, would be able to increase revenues by 30 percent during the coming year.

Predicting FIM revenues has proved tricky for News Corp., which had to publicly back down last spring from a promise it had made in the summer of 2007. And now that Web advertisers are finally admitting that they’re seeing weakness, that 30 percent may be difficult to achieve too.

Given that the year-ago quarter was underwhelming, and that the last quarter covers the July to September period–most of which was catastrophe-free–there’s a good chance FIM will report in-line ad sales on Wednesday.

But pay attention to whether Murdoch and Chernin are able to reiterate past projections for the rest of the year.

I’m told that the ad-targeting technology MySpace is pushing is indeed boosting revenue at the site. And the video plans the company announced yesterday are interesting as well: An automated ID program will let publishers like Viacom (VIA) unit MTV Networks automatically place ads on user-uploaded content that they own.

Google’s (GOOG) YouTube announced something similar earlier this year.

But those programs only work at the margins of MySpace’s business, and are long-term plays. The most important part is getting big advertisers to buy big campaigns on MySpace’s prime real estate.

Such as its homepage, where a one-day campaign was going for an average of $500,000 earlier this year, and where particularly intrusive campaigns could garner $1,000,000 for 24 hours.

If those rates are softening, then it won’t matter how innovative the company is in the near term: It’s going to have to reset expectations.