Comscore's Web Boxscores – Dec 2008

As the election season eased, the Weather Channel replaced news sources atop the comScore charts in Dec with 41.5mln unique visitors. The massive 75% rise in time spent on the site seems to come from a lot of page flipping and perhaps some more mobile access. Weather.com boasts that it had 1.1bln page views for the month, a record for the site. Adding to its hurricane-like tailwinds, the mobile implementation is also setting records, although the company doesn’t specify exact counts. Localized video feeds have become an attractive piece of the Weather Channel implementations on mobile Web, iPhone and Google Android Applications. They can be samoled also within a standard Web browser at http://mvideo.weather.com/.

Meanwhile, MSNBC jockeys back into the number 2 slot in front of CNN, although the time spent metric at the latter remains substantially ahead. CNN increased the video content at its site in the last 6 months. The site is telling more of its stories through video, clicking directly through to a video player that merchandises even more clips. On some pages like CNNMoney, video autostarts for anyone landing on the page. Look for both news sites to spike in their Jan reports as the Inauguration drew a record number of news visits and video streams.

Climbing down from comScore’s top ten, both major shopping networks solidified their Nov holiday gains. QVC had6.3mln uniques in December compared to 5.9 in November, while HSN had 4.9mln visitors, up from 4.1mln.

Meanwhile, TV Guide’s online audience actually retreated slightly in Dec, from 3.9mln to 3.8miln, but it maintains a hearty 28bln minutes of hang time in part because of video viewing. Christy Tanner, the site’s Editor-in-Chief and vp, marketing, says most people come to the site for their local listing. Increasingly, however, visitors are using the TVGuide online video guide, which connects them to prime time shows streaming around that the cable and network media companies bring online. Its own collection of video trailers and TVGuide Channel spots also get distributed to partner sites and blogs as embedded video. Tanner says TVGuide is seeing a fair amount of video traffic coming to their site from these syndicated embeds.

Generally, Nov and Dec are hard months on content, but there was remarkable resilience at the upper end of the comScore list. Audience size for the cable TV segment was stagnant when theoretically it could have gone down as eyeballs get diverted to e-commerce. The softness tended to occur lower down on the list. BravotTV for instance had 999,000 visitors, down from 1.4mln in November. And National Geographic went from 3.9mln to 3.1mln. One happy recipient of holiday cheer is G4TV, up to 724,000 from 555,000. Video gaming, after all, was the once segment of the economy that showed gains this season.