A couple of months ago I wrote about the Graying of Facebook and how that more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and that Facebook’s fastest growing demo is 55-plus.

So I was shocked to see an article in MediaPost that referenced some data from Insidefacebook.com that said that during April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months.  Read more... (227 words, 3 images, estimated 54 secs reading time)

Interesting data from TV Week  that shows that while YouTube remains the No. 1 online video site, Hulu continues to see exponential growth.

Hulu is the fastest-growing site among Nielsen Online’s top 10 video brand sites, which include YouTube, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive Media, Nickelodeon Kids & Family Network, MSN/Windows Live, ABC.com, MTV Networks Music and Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital.

YouTube delivered 5.5 billion total streams in April, while Hulu increased 490% from 63.2 million streams in April 2008 to hit 373.3 million in April ’09.

Jon Gibs, vice president of media and analytics for Nielsen Online, attributed Hulu’s growth to “a good interface and excellent, aggressive marketing campaign.”  Read more... (386 words, 1 image, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

As I have written about many times this year, twitter is the incredible hot at the moment. Everyone from your local coffee shop to Oprah is on Twitter and Twitter’s growth is skyrocketing.

eMarketer estimates there will be over 12 million Twitter users in the US in 2009, slightly more than twice last year’s number.

But figures released by Nielsen Online suggest that Twitter’s retention rate is only 40%. In other words, as David Martin wrote on the Nielsen blog:  Read more... (383 words, 3 images, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

Saw this over on Buzz Networker where they linked to a slideshow at O’Reilly Radar on Facebook trends. Click the O’Reilly link for the full presentation of Facebook trends, but here some interesting facts:  Read more... (167 words, 1 image, estimated 40 secs reading time)

• 193+ million users broken down 51% Female and 45% Male
• Largest age group of active users in the USA – 18-25
• Largest growing category in the USA – 55-59 ( with 60-65 not far behind)
• Top countries in Asia for Facebook usage – Indonesia and Hong Kong.
• Only Africa books the trend with more male than female users.

A mediapost article reported that total video streams increased almost 9% to 9.7 billion in March. As expected, YouTube dominates the video streaming market with nearly 5.5 billion streams in March. Interestingly, Hulu was second with 348.5 million streams and Yahoo third with 231.8 million.

Hulu.com is a partnership between News Corp. and NBC’ and is now a solid second to YouTube in online video. It continued its steady rise in March increasing streams about 10% and adding about 600,000 unique viewers for a total of 9.5 million. Another traditional media site is Fox Interactive Media who are fourth with 207.5 million streams; up from 194.3 million in February  Read more... (222 words, 1 image, estimated 53 secs reading time)

Facebook announced this week that it added its 200 millionth user on April 8, 2009. The US had more Facebook users than any other country. However, the largest concentration of users was in the Eastern US and Western Europe.

In Q1 of this year, the  fastest-growing segment of the US Facebook population was people ages 26 to 44, and other countries will undoubtedly follow that path. See our earlier post on this called the Graying of Facebook.

The challenge for Facebook and advertisers is to get users to click on ads, as brands are still looking for ways to leverage the social networking space.  Read more... (206 words, 2 images, estimated 49 secs reading time)