nielsen

Study: Quarter of all online adults own gaming consoles

People who surf the Web also seem to love playing games. Among online adults, 27 percent own a gaming console, with another 10 percent planning to buy one over the next year, says a report released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.

Nintendo's Wii was the top console in May, owned by 14.3 percent of Web surfers tracked. That compares with a 9.4 percent market share among online adults for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and 5 percent for the Sony Playstation 3. But Sony's older Playstation 2 scored top honors, owned by 17.3 percent of online users.… Read more

Apple tops hardware sites in May traffic

iPhone fever was hot in May, at least based on the number of people who frequented Apple's Web site.

The Mac maker's Apple.com last month hosted 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released on Monday by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of second-ranked Hewlett-Packard, which drew in 21.9 million people.

May visitors to Apple's Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it, perhaps in anticipation of the pending release of the … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1006: Butt-nibbling robots

Artists are developing robots that can consume flies and rodents. That means they'll get a taste for flesh. What could go wrong? They come for your butt, that's what. We also take NASA to task, and discuss the effect of Michael Jackson's death on the Internet and what it might mean for future emergencies. All that and some ageism.

Listen now: Download today's podcast Subscribe now: iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video) | RSS (audio) | RSS (video) EPISODE 1006

News sites swamped following Michael Jackson’s death http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273325-93.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273277-93.html… Read more

Myths and realities of teen media trends

Nielsen is out with a new report on media consumption by teens and the results are counter-intuitive to what we commonly believe to be the norm. According to the How Teens Use Media report (PDF), "teens exhibit media habits that are more similar to the total population than not."

Key takeaways from the report:

Teens are not abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more TV than ever, up 6 percent over the past five years in the U.S. Teens love the Internet, but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours … Read more

2.8 million not ready for DTV transition

Are you ready to go digital? Almost 3 million American homes may not be...yet.

Friday is the deadline for the country's move from analog to digital TV. At that point, most analog signals will be shut off. But 2.8 million homes still lack the necessary equipment to receive digital transmissions, says a report released Wednesday by Nielsen.

The number of homes not ready for DTV represents 2.5 percent of the TV market. The report notes that younger, African American, and Hispanic households are disproportionately unready, while the elderly are the most ready.

Geographically, the greatest number … Read more

Report: Social networking up 83 percent for U.S.

The explosion in social networking may be even greater than imagined. The time that people in the U.S. spend on social network sites is up 83 percent from a year ago, according to a report from market researcher Nielsen Online.

Facebook enjoys the top spot among social networks, with people having spent a total of 13.9 billion minutes on the service in April of this year, 700 percent more than in April 2008, Nielsen said. Minutes spent on Twitter soared a whopping 3,712 percent to almost 300 million, versus around 7.8 million from the same month … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 964: Bros out loud

Natali's out, and Jason and I are joined by Donald and Brian Tong, making for a fun-filled episode in which Tom says stupid, guy things, like "touchdown line." But we do talk about the Windows 7 RC and Atom processors getting used in Netbooks.

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 964

Microsoft preps Windows 7 release http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8026736.stm

Microsoft to disable Autorun http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/2110241

In major shift, Apple builds its own team to design chips http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104666426570729.html… Read more

Twitter's lack of loyalty--an Achilles' heel?

Some interesting data from Nielsen suggests that Twitter, despite the hype and meteoric growth, appears to have a user loyalty problem, an issue not suffered by Facebook or MySpace, the two behemoths of social networking.

Considering the viral nature of Twitter, I was a bit surprised to see that users weren't more loyal. On the other hand, sites like Facebook and MySpace offer a lot more functions that facilitate communication on many levels, not just through messaging.

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter's audience retention … Read more

Mellencamp mourns the death of the record biz

Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).

With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how … Read more