The vast majority (96%) of Americans watch TV in their homes, roughly double the number (48%) who now watch video online, according to [download page] a February 2012 report from Nielsen. Yet the proportion watching TV in their homes fell 0.2% year-over-year, while those watching video on the internet grew 4.9%. Mobile subscribers watching video online in Q3 2011 showed the fastest growth, jumping 37% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter to reach more than 10% of the population. Read More »

National TV sports generated $10.9 billion in advertising expenditure last year, representing 6% growth from $10.3 billion the year prior, according to a Nielsen report released in January 2012. Measuring ad spend during sporting events on network and cable TV from Q4 2010 through Q3 2011, Nielsen found that cable has an increasing share of those ad dollars, growing 37.3% year-over-year. Read More »

The share of US adults who own tablets nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December 2011 and early January 2012, and the same surge in growth also applied to e-readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same period, according to [pdf] survey results released in January 2012 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In November 2010, just 5% of Americans owned a tablet, meaning that ownership has almost quadrupled in the past 14 months. Read More »

290 million Americans owned at least 1 TV in 2011, while 253 million owned a DVD player, putting both devices ahead of mobile phones in ownership (232 million), according to [pdf] a January 2012 report from Nielsen. 114.7 million households owned at least 1 TV, with the largest number of those (35.9 million) owning 4 or more. In total, 288 million viewers aged 2 and up watched traditional TV, while 143 million watched TV or video on the internet. The 111 million viewers watching timeshifted TV in Q2 2011 represented 11% year-over-year growth. Read More »

55% of online consumers who have shopped in the past 90 days say that when making a digital purchase of under $25 they are concerned that the site will start sending them junk e-mail, closely followed by the proportion who cite a concern that their personal information will be sold to other merchants (54%), according to [download page] a PaymentOne survey conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research released in December 2011. Data from “Why Consumers Don’t Pay: Opportunities for Digital Commerce” indicates that a majority of active online shoppers are concerned that their credit card data would be intercepted or that unauthorized parties would access the information saved in the merchant’s database. Read More »

14.4% of Asian Americans have used a tablet at least one a month this year, according to December 2011 figures from eMarketer. Data from the estimate indicates this to be the highest penetration among ethnic groups, ahead of Hispanics (12.6%), African Americans (10.5%), and whites (10.1%). Penetration rates appear to have soared from last year, with all ethnic groups at least doubling their rate of ownership: overall adoption has risen from 4.2% in 2010 to an estimated 10.8% this year. Read More »

Consumers continue to rely on traditional sources of information such as store flyers, recommendations from friends and family, and magazines or newspaper ads for their holiday gift shopping preparations, although internet resources are also relatively highly utilized for some product categories, according to a Harris Interactive survey released in December 2011. Read More »

Facebook users tend to have friends of about the same age, a pattern that holds true even for users aged 60, for whom the distribution of their friends’ ages sharply peaks at exactly 60, according to a study from the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano. Data from the study indicates that Facebook friends are also very locally clustered, with 84% of all connections being between users in the same country.

According to the research, the median friend count on Facebook is 100, while the average friend count is 190. Read More »

More than 3 in 5 African American, Hispanic, and Asian American women in the US have a smartphone in their household, compared to just one-third of Caucasian women, according to [download page] a November 2011 report from Nielsen. Data from “Women of Tomorrow” indicates that levels of adoption among other technologies are much more similar: roughly 95% of women across all ethnicities are connected to the Internet and TV, slightly edging cell phone penetration rates. Read More »

Close to all (97%) of Americans watch TV in their homes, double the number (48%) who now watch video online, according to [download page] an October 2011 report from Nielsen. Results from “The Cross-Platform Report” indicate that mobile subscribers watching video online in Q2 2011 grew 36% year-over-year, and now constitute 10% of the American population. The number of Americans watching time-shifted TV also grew 13% from Q2 2010, to more than one-third of the population. Read More »