Posted 05/24/09 at 12:20:48 PM by Justin Kerr

New research from NPD and Nielsens reveals some fairly interesting information on how Americans spend their free time, and the results might surprise you. On the gaming front, 63 percent of Americans reported having played some form of video game within the past six months, while only 43 per cent admitted to having gone to see a movie in the theatre. This bodes well for the gaming industry which reported that consumers now spend roughly one third of their entertainment budget on games, which equates to about $38 per person per month on average for content.

On the video front, Neilsen has released a separate study that shows online video might not be as big a threat as the major TV networks are letting on. Despite the rapid rise in online video viewing, consumers on average only watched about three hours per month via the Internet. That is up an hour from the results last year, but still only represents about 1.1 percent of total video consumption, which is totally dominated by traditional TV.

The other interesting statistic is that when it comes to video, apparently we are now watching more TV than ever before. The average American now consumes about 153.5 hours of TV per month, which works out to over 5 hours per day. This study excludes non-legitimate video sources such as peer to peer networks, but includes numbers pulled from Hulu, You Tube, and many other online video sites. Want to read the whole study? Click the link to read the whole report.

So how do you spend your spare time?

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Posted 12/18/08 at 03:31:26 PM by Andy Salisbury

And when we say large, we absolutely mean it. Facebook, having just hit the 130 million active user mark at the beginning of December, is already up to a whopping 140 million.

Facebook’s projected growth was about 300,000 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the fourth quarter. Recently, that number has gone as high as 600,000 to 700,000 per day. Should Facebook’s growth continue at that rate, it’ll add up to 20 million new users in December alone and reach 200 million active users by March.

What’s even more fun, is that Facebook has released numbers on how their users spend their time on the site (creepy, huh?). 13 million user update their statuses at least once each day, 700 million photos are uploaded to the site each month, 4 million videos are uploaded each month, 15 million pieces of content (including web links, news stories, blog posts, notes and photos) are shared each month, and there are 19 million active groups on the site.

So what do all these numbers mean? Simply put, the number of users Facebook has is greatly increasing, as is their engagement on the site.

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