Nielsen is out with a new report which brings together TV, Internet and mobile usage together for U.S. households. They found that Americans are watching more than 127 hours a month of television programming. Could the higher gas prices and food prices be a factor in this increase?

Average Internet usage was up 9% to 26 hours a month. New metrics in the report include 2 hours of Internet video per month on average and 3 hours of mobile video for users who are subscribed to a mobile video plan.

The interesting chart is below - this is a breakdown of the above stats by age group. Teens who are subscribed to a mobile video plan are viewing over 5 hours of mobile video a month. For Internet users we see a bell curve with those in the 35-44 age bracket using the Internet the highest amount. But look at those 65+, they are using the Internet over 26 hours on average.

I’ve said many times that the 65+ market is one to consider as you think about creating a startup. I know it’s cool and hip to make a Twitter or FriendFeed, but there are other groups to consider - and many of those groups have money to spend and aren’t demanding free.

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Check out the video below. It’s from the Idiots of Ants who are a comedy group based in the U.K. It starts with a poke and ends with a game of Facebook Scrabble. Best part, "do you want to be my friend, confirm or ignore!"

What this video shows is that there still is a difference between how people act online and how they act offline.

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The Nielsen Company is announcing the launch of a new measurement tracking service today. Named TotalWeb, the company describes the service as, "…integrates data from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online to show the unduplicated, unique audience for more than 200 leading Internet sites across the PC and mobile Internet space."

The first TotalWeb report is out today and it shows how the mobile Web increases reach and audience lift. For example, weather sites averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone. That’s pretty darn significant!

I would have thought map and traffic sites would have made the list. It looks like the list is heavily dominated by entertainment and productivity — not shopping (poor Godiva!). Nielsen notes that 87 million U.S. mobile users subscribe to mobile Internet services, and more than one in ten mobile subscribers (13.7 percent) actively uses mobile Internet each month.

This will be an interesting report to watch this year and see how mobile Internet usage shifts. I use my new Samsung Ace only for productivity currently.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)

Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that AT&T pays Apple $18 a month per iPhone. And, after some quick math to figure in research firm iSuppli’s July estimate that it costs $265 to build each device, which retails for $399, others are now estimating Apple profits $565 per iPhone over two years. No wonder Jobs felt so comfortable shafting the early adopters who paid $599 for their phones.

Source:Valleywag

AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution Health will lay off 60 employees in the next 24 hours, according to an internal memo. The bloodletting comes a day earlier than Valleywag reported yesterday. Lowlights from the bloody memo after the jump.

Revolution Health president Tim Davenport butters them up …

As a newcomer, I’ve been impressed by the progress that you all have made. From the launch in April to now, the growth has been terrific. With the drugstore.com partnership, Revolution Health Networks will aggregate over 9 million unique visitors in October, and more than 100 million page views - the latter will make us the third most viewed health information network on the web, behind only WebMD and Weight Watchers.

… and then delivers the blow …

After studying all of this, I’ve decided that we need to do some restructuring at Revolution Health Networks, to position us for our next phase of expansion. As you might expect, these changes involve some people switching jobs, and others leaving the company. When all the shifting and changes are done, I expect that RHN - which has about 240 employees now - will have about 180 by January 1st

…and then tells laid-off workers where their salaries are going….

despite these changes at RHN, the overall number of employees in the Revolution Health Group companies (Revolution Health Networks, CarePages, Extend Health and RediClinic) will continue to grow this year: Revolution Health Group (and its affiliates) began the year with about 500 employees, and will end with about 700 employees, a sizable increase.

… then slaps the remaining employees on the ass and tells them to get in the game …

For those remaining at the company, we will then have an all-hands meeting after these individual and departmental discussions have been completed. There is much to be proud of at Revolution Health, and the overall growth of the company is impressive.

(Photo by mre770)

Source:Valleywag

The last we heard from Google on TV advertising, cofounder Sergey Brin gloated that “interest” and “bookings” were up. He told us that “the remarkable thing about television advertising, is that it is almost as accountable as online advertising.” I didn’t believe him then. The news that Nielsen has agreed to provide Google with demographic data on television audiences makes me even more skeptical. This just shows that Google had no idea what it was getting into when it decided to try to get into selling TV ads.

As long as viewers can’t click on a television commercial or otherwise alert an advertiser that their pitch succeeded or failed, TV commercials will remain undertargeted and obnoxious. Yes, that means Chevy will continue to tell you this is our country for quite some time.

Here’s what I think Brin meant to say, but couldn’t .

Google is currently testing TV advertising with satellite provider EchoStar, which just purchased Sling Media. Sling Media makes a device called the Slingbox. It relays television through the Internet for viewing on a PC.

If Google were to introduce an advertising unit similar to its YouTube InVideo ads for this subset of TV viewers, it could, perhaps, start to make TV advertising as accountable as Brin suggested it already was.

When a Google TV/EchoStar advertiser’s commercial shows up on a PC screen through a Slingbox, Google could make a link to the advertiser available. Then, Google would have click-through data and actual accountability. But not until then.

For now, all Google can determine is whether a given TV set is actually turned on and tuned to a specific channel at the time an ad runs; it also claims to detect when people change channel in the middle of an ad. But if you go to the toilet mid-ad? Google has no clue. The fact that it had to turn to Nielsen to supplement this with demographics about the people watching an ad just goes to show how weak Google’s TV-ad data really is. Funny how no one seems to be holding Google accountable for this.

(Photo by danagraves)

NEW YORK - A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

However, Yahoo Inc. and others are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

Page views also drop as people spend more time watching online video at sites like Google Inc.’s YouTube.

"Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. "We’re changing our stance on how the data should be" used.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won’t formally rank them. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site’s ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

In both page views and time spent, Yahoo is ahead of News Corp.’s MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites, according to the Nielsen measures.

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.