Upon Apple’s announcement of a new iPhone – the iPhone 3G S, slated to be available June 19 – Nielsen takes a look at iPhone insights on its users and usage.

As of April 2009, Nielsen estimates that there are 6.4 million active iPhone users in the U.S., up from 2.1 million a year prior. The most impactful iPhone announcement this week may be the price reduction of $99 for the 8 GB version: cost has been one factor (in addition to AT&T exclusivity) that’s kept the …

In the first report of its kind, Nielsen Online has released findings on mobile Internet adoption in Canada, showing that 21 percent of Canadian mobile subscribers use their cell phones to browse the Internet. This is up from Q4 2008 with the top sites including portals, e-mail, weather, news & current events and search. Overall, Mobile internet penetration increased from 16 percent in Q4 2008 to 21.3 percent in Q1 2009.

More highlights from Nielsen Online’s Q1 2009 Canadian Mobile Internet Report can be found in the complete media release.

As theories circulate about the actual dollar value of sites like Facebook and Myspace-analysts recently placed Facebook’s worth at $10 billion-there is no question that people continue to gravitate in droves towards social networking and blog sites. In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site when ranked …

Fueled by the expansion of smartphones and the availability of unlimited data packages, the U.S. mobile internet market grew 74% between Feb 07 and Feb 09 according to Nielsen. The most talked about handset, the iPhone, had a U.S. audience of 5.1 million unique users in January 2009. Though this still represents just a fraction of the mobile universe, the device has had an undeniable halo effect on mobile media adoption.

Online engagement by Internet users is deepening, according to a new report on the online landscape released today by The Nielsen Company. This increased engagement is in part a result of a shift toward video content and social networking as popular online subcategories.
Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank takes a look at the economic and advertising impacts of the report.

Highlights Of The Report Include

The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same …

Nielsen’s analysis of online video viewing habits in March shows that more than 9.6 billion streams were viewed by an estimated 130 million web users. In total streams, the figure represents a nearly 9% jump over the previous month, and 38.8% increase over figures released for March 2008.
YouTube, hulu, and Yahoo! were the top three sites for streaming video, serving up more than 6 billion video streams among them.

Susan D. Whiting, Vice Chair & Executive Vice President, The Nielsen Company
Of the myriad challenges confronting the television industry, the much-discussed defection by viewers to online and mobile platforms may be the most comforting; simply because it hasn’t happened. Despite the profusion of multimedia computers, broadband Internet connections and portable video devices, the overwhelming majority of Americans are staying right where they are – in front of their TV sets inside their homes.
That is just one finding from a new, year-long Video Consumer Mapping study, which calls into question several …

Brandon Eshman, Nielsen Online
According to the old saying “content is king,” right? But what if a combination of content and convenience are ultimately what attract consumers? It’s no secret that media today comes in many easy-to-access formats: video, music, TV, podcasts, etc., at the palm of our hand. Consumers have the ultimate choice in what they view and when they choose to view (or participate with) the content. The convergence of traditional viewing habits and the web is inevitable, as evidenced by the popularity of Hulu, …

Nielsen’s analysis of online video viewing habits in October shows that more than 5 billion video streams were viewed by almost 83 million YouTube users throughout the month.
Fox Interactive Media followed with 244 million streams and almost 18.5 million viewers. 
Hulu jumped from seventh place in September (142 million streams; 6.3 million viewers) to claim third place in October, with more than 206 million streams and 9 million viewers.

According to data compiled by Nielsen for the third quarter of 2008, more than 100 million US consumers – 42% of mobile subscribers – have video-capable cell phones. An estimated 10.3 million of those mobile consumers are watching TV/video on their cell phones. These findings indicate that mobile video viewing has increased 14% as compared with Q2 2008.
On average, viewers are spending an average 17 sessions per month viewing video, spending roughly 15 minutes per session. Apple’s iPhone emerged as the top device among mobile video viewers, with 9% of …