The media has relentlessly covered the Tiger Woods story, but lately, Woods’ presence as product pitchman has been scarce. In addition to Tiger’s personal troubles, Nielsen data shows that brands associated with the golfing great are becoming part of the collateral damage.

Preliminary figures show that expenditures fell $10.9 billion to a total spend of $83.4 billion in the first nine months of the year.

Meet the mini media moguls who are dictating electronic sales and media utilization patterns in American homes: kids. TV still dominates with children of all ages, but older children gravitate toward the Internet and younger kids hang on to DVDs.

Given the consistent spike in usage among the three screens of television, Internet and mobile, consumers are clearly adding video platforms to their schedule, rather than replacing them.

In its opening week, “I Dreamed a Dream,” the debut album from singing phenom Susan Boyle, topped the Billboard 200 album chart with sales of 701,000 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan, overtaking Eminem’s “Relapse” as the year’s best sales week for an album in the U.S.

President Obama made his seventh prime time appearance this year to announce a strategy for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The speech was carried live on Tuesday December 1, 2009 from 8:00PM to approximately 8:36PM on 10 television networks.

In its first week of publication, Going Rogue: An American Life by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was the highest-selling book of the week in the U.S. according to Nielsen Bookscan.

Hit digital albums have lost market share to far less popular titles. But hit digital tracks have gained market share over the years.

2010 will be huge test, as new realities of consumer expression and cross-platform integration create a powerful new dynamic hovering over the largest single-spot ad spend on record.

The Nielsen Company today reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for October 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 26 percent growth in total streams.