Check it out (click tables to enlarge):

Note that these numbers are actually all down from August. Apparently some of you spent your last days before returning to work or school in front of your Web browser.

Meanwhile, Nielsen’s Top 10 list has the usual suspects. That is–Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and then everyone else. Interesting to note the disparity between total audience and total streams on Hulu compared to Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSN. Hulu is attracting a smaller but much more engaged audience than the big portals.

At some point, this could be a problem for the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and Disney’s (DIS) ABC since advertisers ultimately want reach. But it’s still astonishingly early for the site–recall that it only went out of beta in March 2008, and doesn’t have a major portal promoting it.

One caveat: Note that for whatever reason, Web video publishers tend to push the numbers they get from comScore (SCOR) more than the Nielsen numbers. But directionally, they tend to say the same thing.

Allrighty, then. If you’re going to spend so much time watching Web clips, best to make sure you’re watching something excellent. Like this clip from last night’s “The Daily Show”–a classic evisceration of CNN. Jon Stewart and crew often go after the cable channel and its brethren, but this one is particularly good. Warning! It is more than 11 minutes long!

The numbers come from Nielsen’s quarterly “Three Screen” report, which measures eyeballs watching video on TV, on the Web and on mobile devices. And just like the report Nielsen put out three months ago, it shows that even while Americans gobble up more online video, they’re still watching as much TV as they ever have. More, even: The number of viewers increased by 0.9 percent, while the time they spent watching TV increased 1.5 percent.

Here’s how the numbers break down (click tables below to enlarge):

Total number of viewers:

Time spent viewing:

Two different theories, which are not mutually exclusive, may explain the ever-increasing amount of video we’re supposedly gorging on:

• We’re out of work or underemployed, and we’re filling those hours with sitcoms and dogs-on-skateboard clips.
• We’re multitasking and gorging on all of this stuff at the same time.

On that last theory: Nielsen says 57 percent of us are spending at least an hour a month watching Web video and TV at the same time. We’re much more likely to turn on the TV while we’re Web-surfing than vice versa, though.

No surprise, by the way, to see that people are spending more time watching Web video. But interesting to note that while the universe of mobile video watchers has increased, they’re spending less time watching.

For what it’s worth, Nielsen says that short-form clips–like those from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube–make up 83 percent of Web video viewing, while “name-brand TV network content” makes up the majority of mobile video. Note that Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, doesn’t have a mobile option, so it can’t claim credit for those eyeballs.

Too many numbers! Time for video. Here’s a clip of the Minnesota Vikings’ (!) Brett Favre from this week’s “Monday Night Football” game. This one has been seen more than half a million times, but there’s no way it’s legal. So it will go down sooner or later–both the NFL and ESPN are pretty zealous about this stuff.

But right now it’s promoted for all to see on YouTube’s homepage. Which means there are still some kinks in the company’s vaunted “ContentID” program.

But game sales have been weak in 2009, even as movie theaters set box office records. What gives?

I’ll let someone else try to explain the movie side of the ledger (although those box office numbers aren’t always what they seem to be). But it turns out that there’s a simple explanation for game slump: It’s that gamers are huddled in their basements playing Grand Theft Auto over and over and over.

Gamers are indeed spending more time playing videogames, say new data from Nielsen. It’s just that gamers aren’t spending more money on games. Instead, they’re playing the games they have, buying used games, and increasingly turning to game subscription services.

Here’s the argument in chart form–you can get a summary here or download the full report here (PDF). Click on the charts to enlarge:

Hours played:

Used games purchased:

Subscription rate:

All of which explains why Best Buy (BBY) and Wal-Mart (WMT) are both getting into the used game business and why Blockbuster (BBI) and GameFly are expanding their game rental business. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to my game of Hover Kart.

While Squires solves that riddle, he’ll leave his day job as head of the “news business unit” (Time, Fortune, Money, etc.). In his place will be… Moore, who is already running the company’s style group.

I chatted briefly via email with Squires, who is good-natured about the assignment. But I have to take issue with him (and everyone else who uses this example) re iTunes. Apple (AAPL) didn’t prove that people are willing to pay for content online–we’d already seen that (at The Wall Street Journal, among other examples). Apple proved that people are willing to pay for portions–that would be songs–of products that were previously only sold in bundles–that would be CDs.

You can debate whether this was terrible for the music industry or simply the least-bad option. But I don’t think it makes sense to compare the experience of the music industry with news and other Web content that people aren’t used to paying for in any form.

Here’s my Q&A with Squires:

MediaMemo: I’m struck by Ann’s “genie” reference–are we meant to take that in a tongue-in-cheek way, or do you folks really think you can put the free-content genie back in the bottle? Or am I misinterpreting that?

John Squires: We’re not unrealistic about the challenge, but iTunes showed people will pay for something attractively packaged and fairly priced that they once got for free….We also wanted to get your attention. So I guess we’re genies.

MM: Do you imagine that Time Inc. will be taking content that’s currently available for free online and putting it behind a pay wall? Or are you more focused on creating new products you can charge for?

JS: This is part of what we’ll be testing. Certainly some online content will remain free because we’re eager to keep our large online audiences (over 26 million Nielsen uniques) and successful advertising model. Some other online content may be subscription-based. And the content we create for mobile readers will be a completely new experience, with different design and functions that we think consumers will want to pay for.

MM: Haven’t heard Time Inc.’s voice in the “Google isn’t playing fair” chorus. How much, if any, energy are you spending on getting the search engine to help you/take less from you, etc.?

JS: We’re not part of that chorus at the moment.

MM: Is this a permanent assignment or will you go back to News at some point?

JS: We’ll see what comes out of this assignment.

And here’s the companywide memo from Moore:

To:       Time Inc. Employees

From:   Ann Moore

Re: How to Put the Genie Back Into the Bottle; Special Assignment for John Squires

It won’t be a revelation to any of you that the publishing business is changing rapidly. While print magazines are not going away, and while we have built vibrant websites with over 26 million unique visitors and 750 million pages views each month, it’s increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business. We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content.

Given the magnitude of the opportunity, I have asked John Squires to take on a new role and devote his full time efforts this summer to developing the best business plan for the future. John’s qualifications for this assignment are ideal. He has a strong background in consumer marketing and digital content and has stature in the publishing industry, as well as with digital software and hardware companies. It is likely we will be seeking partners and allies in our quest to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’.

As many of you know, we are currently pursuing four related initiatives:

1.    Evolving our current website businesses by identifying and developing consumer revenue streams.

2.    Accelerating the creation of applications for smartphone platforms.

3.    Developing new products and business models for portable digital readers.

4.    Exploring partnerships with other publishers to develop the optimal retail store for our digital products.

John will need the support of many, including Consumer Marketing, Legal, Strategy and Business Development, and the Time Inc. titles. Please pitch in with all your resources available when he calls.

During this assignment, similar to the role I’m playing at the Style and Entertainment Group, I will assume responsibility for the News Business Unit.

A.M.

Last month, we saw a Nielsen study that reached this conclusion. Now comes, um, another study funded by Nielsen, but conducted by a different group, which says more or less the same thing. The difference: Rather than asking consumers how they spend their video time, researchers actually followed them around their house and watched them watch video.

Seriously. Look, here’s a picture!

Different methodology, same results. Both studies say people spend 99% of their time watching TV and only a tiny fraction of their time watching Web or mobile video. The top bar in the chart below comes from the earlier Nielsen study; the bar below comes from the new, Nielsen-funded study (click to enlarge):

And these results don’t vary much if you account for age: Even the young folks watch more TV more than 98% of the time (click to enlarge).

For argument’s sake, let’s say that both studies are accurate, and that the digital chattering classes are much more interested in Web video than regular humans are. So. Should we stop paying attention to Hulu, Google’s YouTube (GOOG), and every other web video site? Of course not.

If you’re in the business of making TV, or buying and selling TV ads (like many of the new study’s sponsors happen to be), then these results can give you some assurance that you’ll still have work in the near future — maybe even several years, given that the advertising business is so resistant to change.

But do remember that Saturday Night Live’s Lazy Sunday hit YouTube, and kicked off the Web video boom, in December 2005 — less than four years ago. Think these Nielsen numbers will stay the same in 2013?

So says Nielsen, via its newest “Three Screen Report.” The tracking service says more Americans are watching TV than ever before–up 1.2 percent in the last quarter–and they’re spending more time watching TV, too–that’s up 1.9 percent, to a staggering 153-plus hours per month. Of course, the same holds true for Web video, which is growing much faster.

Here’s how the data break down. Total number of viewers (click to enlarge):

Time spent viewing (click to enlarge):

Don’t be fooled: As much as the blogosphere likes to describe the TV guys as clueless dummies, they’re well aware that they’re now competing with the likes of Hulu and Google’s (GOOG) YouTube for their viewers’ time. That’s why Hulu, the JV between GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and now, Disney’s (DIS) ABC, remains such a controversial site within the industry–one camp thinks it’s the best way for the networks to position themselves against the eventual move to the Web, and the other thinks they’re hastening their own demise by training viewers to expect free, on-demand access via the Web.

We may get a slightly better sense of what advertisers think about this soon. It’s “upfront” week in New York, which means that all the broadcast networks–CBS (CBS), NBC, Fox and ABC have begun selling their wares to advertisers for next year. Prognosticators are betting that upfront sales could be down by 15 percent or so this year, but they’re assuming that most of that decrease has to do with the miserable economy, not a full-blown move–or “secular shift,” as the smart guys like to say–away from TV and to the Web. If that decrease gets much bigger though, it could mean something else is afoot.

Enough with the serious! Here’s the excellent celebrity singalong from the finale of “30 Rock,” which aired last week. NBC only allows Hulu to keep episodes of the show on the site for a limited time (expect to see more of this restriction, not less), so this may only work for a few weeks. Enjoy:

But a common criticism of Nielsen’s study–which I also raised–was that Nielsen was only measuring visits to Twitter.com and not Twitter use via third-party apps. Theoretically, it’s possible to be an avid Twitter user without ever visiting the service’s Web site more than once.

Point taken, says Nielsen, which says it reran its study to account for that. And… no change! From Nielsen’s blog:

“As an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others. The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month.”

If you’re so inclined, you can argue that Nielsen is still missing a big swath of Twitter users because it seems to have ignored mobile apps, which is where a lot of Twittering occurs.

But I still think Nielsen’s numbers sound about right, both in methodology and conclusion. I think it’s entirely possible that the majority of people who try Twitter don’t end up sticking with it, and I think that people who do use Twitter on third-party apps still end up at the site once a month. I do.

Turns out the majority of those new Twitterers won’t be back in May.

So says Nielsen Online, which estimates that 60 percent of Twitter’s users leave after a month. That makes sense on a gut level to me: Twitter is easy to use, but it often takes a while to make sense, and if you’re not a professional self-promoter–or someone with a lot of friends who are already on Twitter–it may never make sense.

It’s worth noting here that Nielsen is likely overstating the churn because it is only measuring visits to the Twitter.com URL. The majority of Twitter use happens away from the site, on mobile phones and apps like Tweetdeck, and it’s theoretically possible to be an avid Twitterer but never visit Twitter.com after you sign up. I’ve asked the Twitter folks for their take on the stats and will update if they respond.

But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the Nielsen stats are correct, or close to being correct. Is that a problem? Obviously, every Web service attracts new users who never come back after they try it out, so churn in itself isn’t a problem. The question is the rate.

The good news is that Twitter’s 40 percent retention rate is higher than it used to be. Prior to the Oprah madness of this month, Twitter’s rate was closer to 30 percent, Nielsen says.

But the measurement company argues, via a fancy chart and equation, that 40 percent retention makes it mathematically impossible for Twitter to achieve significant penetration with Internet users. The simple version is that if Twitter loses three out of five users a month, its growth will be capped at about 10 percent of the audience. Fancy version below (click chart to enlarge):

And here’s how Twitter’s retention rate compares to that of Facebook and MySpace (again, note that Facebook users and MySpace users more or less have to visit the those sites to use them, so the numbers are likely slightly skewed):

So what if Twitter really is a service that appeals to no more than 10 percent of the Internet audience? Is that such bad thing? Not at all. That’s an awfully big number.

And “retention” may end up being the wrong metric to measure a service like Twitter, anyway. See this perceptive post by Andrew Chen (thanks to OMGPOP’s Dan Porter for the link).

But a lot of the Twitter sales pitch–to investors and would-be partners like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT)–is contingent on the service’s eventual ubiquity. The appeal of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities, for instance, is less seductive if you’re only searching what a sliver of Internet users are Tweeting about. And knowing that growth is capped could make that impressive hockey stick chart a little less so.

[Image credit: Weegee via the International Center of Photography]

In the meantime, Hulu wants us to know that:

• It’s now the biggest video site that isn’t Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, at least according to one count. Nielsen’s VideoCensus pegs the site’s February traffic at 309 million video views, which puts it ahead of News Corp.’s MySpace and Yahoo (YHOO). But as AdAge’s Michael Learmonth notes, it’s still not on the same playing field as YouTube, which generated 5.2 billion views during the same period.
• It’s not just a video site, it’s a social network. Or at least, it now has some social-network-like features, like the ability to share favorite clips with your pals. TV.com, Sling.com, Joost, et al, do something similar. The good news is that Hulu lets you import connections from Facebook, MySpace, Google, etc. The bad news is that this won’t appease broadcast and cable TV executives who worry that Hulu takes eyeballs away from their offerings, despite what someone told The Wall Street Journal today.
• Hulu users really, really like their “Saturday Night Live.” The show’s clips accounted for nine of the ten most emailed clips in the last year and eight of the ten most viewed videos that were embedded in other sites. Like this one.

Much of that debt belongs to big banks, of course–J.P. Morgan (JPM) has more than $1 billion by itself. But Tribune (TXA) owes lots (though much smaller amounts) of money to lots of media companies, too–mostly dollars that the company’s TV stations owe various studios.

Here’s who’s on the hook:

• Time Warner’s (TWX) Warner Bros. Television: $23.7 million
• News Corp.’s (NWS) Twentieth Television: $8.1 million
• Disney’s (DIS) Buena Vista Entertainment: $6.2 million
• GE’s (GE) NBCU Domestic TV: $4.9 million
• Sony’s (SNE) Sony Pictures Television: $2.2 million
• Nielsen Media Research: $1.9 million
• Viacom’s (VIA) Paramount Pictures: $1.69 million

Here’s the complete filing (click button on top right to enlarge):
Tribune’s Bankruptcy Filing

So what does that mean? Nothing, really: Assuming the data are accurate, we still don’t know what people actually spent, and what they spent it on. We’re likely get a few more pieces of the puzzle today, when/if comScore (SCOR) comes out with its online commerce numbers. But the most important data are still locked away in retailers’ databases, and that stuff won’t be public for some time.

[UPDATE: ComScore says sales were up 15 percent.]

One way to tell how retailers really did: Ask somebody who sells Web advertising. An ad exec for an online publisher I spoke to yesterday told me that December sales had “stopped cold” because his clients wanted to see what their Black Friday/Cyber Monday numbers looked like before committing any more ad dollars this year.

He’s hoping for good news. As of last night, he hadn’t heard a peep.

In the meantime, here’s an array of data points from Nielsen and rival Web measurement firm Hitwise. Here are Nielsen’s top online retail destinations, ranked by unique visitors. Note the big increases at Amazon (AMZN), Best Buy (BBY) and Sears (SHLD). Why is Netflix (NFLX) considered an online retailer? Got me. (Click to enlarge)

And here’s Hitwise’s summary of Cyber Monday; note that its take on traffic seems to differ from Nielsen’s when it comes to overall visits:

• Among the top 500 Retail Web sites, the percentage of U.S. visits was down 1% on Cyber Monday 2008 compared with 2007.
• U.S. visits to Brick and Mortar store Web sites (100 total) were down 4% on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to Online-only Web sites (100 total) were up 5% on on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to the Comparison Shopping Web sites were down 21% on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to the Catalog Web sites were down 4% on Cyber Monday.
• The top visited Retail Web site on Cyber Monday 2008 was Amazon.com, receiving 10.77% of U.S. visits among the top 500 Retail Web sites. Walmart.com was the second most visited with 8.55% of visits, followed by Target.com with 4.56%. BestBuy.com was the fourth most visited with 3.81%, and Sears.com was fifth with 2.74% of visits.
• Amazon.com’s traffic increased 21% on Cyber Monday 2008 vs. 2007. Walmart.com’s traffic increased 6%.

[Image Credit: Respres]

It’s no surprise, obviously, that financial advertising has slowed down in the first three quarters of 2008. The surprise is that it’s only been a 10 percent reduction (so far), according to Nielsen.

There are also some interesting breakdowns: Mortgage and loan companies spent 62 percent less (of course). But credit service companies increased their spend by 22 percent, and investment service companies boosted their spend by six percent.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of top 10 financial advertisers (click chart to enlarge): Note that Bank Of America (BAC), one of the comparative winners during the meltdown, has cut its spend by 30 percent so far this year–slightly more than teetering Citigroup’s (C) 26.5 percent cut. Previously left-for-dead ETrade (ETFC), meanwhile, bumped up its spend by 24.5 percent.

Want more unpleasantness? OK. Comes now yet another ad executive to tell you that next year will be very unpleasant for anyone looking to make a living off of advertising revenue.

U.S. advertising spending will drop 5-8 percent next year, says Steve Lanzano, chief operating officer of MPG North America, a unit of French advertising conglomerate Havas SA. Lanzano predicts that sports advertising, long considered one of the most impervious to downturns, will get roughed up as well:

Even television sports, which have become more popular with advertisers since audiences tend to watch the events live rather than recording them, will suffer from the broad pullback in marketing spending, said Lanzano.

Lanzano estimated 9 to 10 percent of spending on broadcast sports comes from financial services and automotive, both industries that have been in turmoil. ‘That’s a lot of money moving out,’ said Lanzano.

‘Because of the hits in the categories that support sports–whether it’s financial or automotive or retail–I think they might take a little more of a hit than they would in other recessionary periods,’ he said.”

OK. Let’s break the glumness up a bit, shall we? If you’re looking for a cheap laugh, head to the Hollywood Reporter’s take on the Nielsen numbers. Then feast your eyes on the unintentional, yet very successful contextual advertising placed to the right of the story (which is where I borrowed the image currently at the top of this story).