Too bad the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t charge for its information or make money off its website — they could have made a pile of cash on the swine flu scare. (You know, if it wasn’t a government site.)

Web traffic measurement firm comScore says traffic soared at CDC.gov last month, as people visited the website amid concerns over the H1N1, or swine, flu.

In April, CDC.gov saw a 142 percent increase in traffic, or 5.7 million visitors, making it the top audience gainer among websites, comScore said. “When news of the swine flu pandemic erupted, many Americans turned to the Internet as their primary source of information for how to keep themselves and their families safe,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix.

Social networks also continued their tear last month, growing 12 percent to nearly 140 million visitors. That’s about three-quarters of the U.S. online population, comScore says, so chances are someone you know is either is Twittering, Facebook-ing or on MySpace. Twitter jumped 83 percent to 17 million visitors, while Facebook grew 10 percent in April from the previous month to reach 67.5 million visitors. MySpace had 71 million visitors.

Keep an eye on:

• Will The Boston Globe’s biggest union balk at the New York Times Co offer? (The Boston Phoenix)
• Web entrepreneurs may no longer need venture capital dollars (The New York Times Bits blog)
• MGM scrambles to restructure its $3.7 billion debt pile (Financial Times)

Photo: Reuters

Hulu continues its rapid ascent up the video charts, cracking the top three online video sites in the U.S. for the first time in March.

Some 380 million videos were viewed on Hulu.com, up 14.3 percent from February, according to market research firm comScore.

That allowed the NBC Universal and News Corp joint venture to steal the No.3 spot from Yahoo, whose total number of videos viewed in March actually declined by roughly 5 percent from February. Hulu held a 2.6 percent share of the 14.5 billion videos viewed in the U.S. last month.

Hulu has seen its popularity grow following TV ads that ran during the Super Bowl in January. In December, it was the No.7 ranked video site in the U.S.

Impressive as Hulu’s growth has been, the site is still not even in the same universe as YouTube, owned by Google. Google remained the No.1 video site in March, according to comScore, with 5.9 billion videos viewed, for a 40.9 percent market share.

Fox Interactive Media, owner of MySpace, held on to its spot as the No.2 place for online vids, although its market share shrank from 3.5 percent in February to 3 percent in March.

It looks like MySpace is getting closer to raiding the competition — at least, one step removed. Facebook veteran Owen Van Natta is expected to be named as the new head of News Corp’s MySpace social network on Friday.

The appointment comes after Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate said earlier this week that MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe would not renew his CEO contract, which expires in the fall. News Corp also said  co-founder Tom Anderson was in talks about taking a new role in the company.

Facebook has already surpassed MySpace in worldwide users. Even though Van Natta, like other high-profile Facebook executives, had left the company already, the question now is whether he can sprinkle some much-needed fairy dust on MySpace that will help it improve its flagging performance. In one sense, this might be starting already. Kara Swisher, proprietor of the Boomtown blog at the News Corp/Dow Jones-owned All Things Digital, reports that part of Van Natta’s remit will be to recruit more new talent to MySpace.

Keep an eye on:

• Joost, the online video website that was once seen as the main rival to Google’s YouTube, is up for sale, and Time Warner Cable could be interested. (Financial Times)
• Hollywood and RealNetworks Inc square off in federal court about RealDVD, a software program that allows you to copy movie discs. (The New York Times)
• What’s ailing Jay Leno? The “Tonight” show host checked into a hospital with an undisclosed illness. (Associated Press)
• The New York Times has no plans to go private, and plans to build its online business and cut costs despite “brutal” conditions. How long for? (Reuters)

(Photo: MySpace founders DeWolfe and Anderson. Reuters)

When News Corp appointed a senior executive last week to oversee a project to share news among its various properties, we didn’t realize that it was including MySpace. Well, maybe “including” is a bit too expansive a word, but check out this announcement that came from the online social network on Monday:

MySpace, the world’s leading online social portal, together with Fox News, today announced an exclusive partnership for the launch of the official MySpace uReport community at http://www.myspace.com/ureport. The partnership, the first between MySpace and Fox News, gives the global MySpace community the ability to share their citizen journalist-produced content with the MySpace community, as well as have the chance to be featured on Fox News.

Members of the MySpace uReport community can become “uReporters” by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories including USA, World, Entertainment and Politics. This content could be featured in relevant programming on Fox News Channel and foxnews.com, with Fox News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page. The community will also feature profiles of Fox News anchors and hosts, allowing members to link to their favorite network personalities.

Well, here’s one more way a laid-off journalist can contribute some reportage to the general populace, albeit with color and layout schemes that can cause eyestrain. On a more serious level, it makes us wonder if it’s a cool feature or actually has some possibility of generating money for Murdoch’s social network.

And, finally, we can’t help but wonder when we’ll get our first top story headine on wsj.com — courtesy of breaking uReporter news on MySpace.

(Now, even legendary actors like Kirk Douglas can be uReporters on MySpace. Photo: Reuters)

You could be forgiven for thinking Twitter was the latest example of youth culture.

From the ability to fire off grammatically-abbreviated updates about daily trifles to keeping tabs on celebrities, the fast-growing microblogging service has all the earmarks of a young person’s pastime.

But Twitter devotees are grayer than one might expect: The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older, according to comScore.

In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.

Twitter has seen its popularity explode in recent months, with the number of unique visitors to its site increasing by more than 1000 percent year-over-year in February, according to comScore.

Social media Web sites like MySpace and Facebook have also experienced an increase in older users recently. But the parade of elders came after younger users drove the initial surge in popularity (in Facebook’s case, of course, the service was initially limited to college students).

Twitter is a rare example of older people embracing a new Web technology at such an early stage, says Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore.

He posits that the knowledge to understand and use a service like Twitter is no longer confined to youngsters as a greater portion of the population has gotten older using the Internet in the past 15 years.

And he notes that social media services like Twitter and Facebook are becoming more and more entwined with business.

Twitter may even be catching on among people who have a reached a post-business phase of their lives: Of the 4 million U.S. Twitter users in February, 5.2 percent were 65 or older.

Whether it’s the recession keeping people searching for cheap entertainment or just the gradual shift of consumer eyeballs to the Web, YouTube’s popularity continues to grow. The Google-owned site topped 100 million U.S. viewers for the first time in January, industry tracker comScore said on Wednesday.

YouTube viewers in the U.S. dialed up more than 6 billion videos in the month. Overall, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 101 videos each in January. The average viewer watched around six hours, comScore said.

And YouTube continues to dwarf its competition, with a nearly 43 percent online video market share. Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, ranked second with a 3.7 percent share.

Consumers seem to be fleeing traditional TV for sites like YouTube because they can see things there they just can’t see elsewhere. And new stars emerge everyday, including impersonators, airport hysterics and teenage rappers.

News Corp is many things to many people. Its latest incarnation? Pinata.

Everyone is taking a whack at Rupert Murdoch’s international media empire these days as its stock languishes and it gets ready to report second-quarter financial results on Thursday. Newspaper advertising revenue is falling, the movie season hasn’t looked so hot so far, MySpace is unlikely to friend Facebook, the euro and the pound are hurting European operations, DVDs are dying and cable networks revenue doesn’t look like it will be able to compensate.

On top of all that, people are beginning to wonder if the company will announce a writedown, and how soon. My story, which ran on Friday, says the newspaper business looks ripe for a writedown, and quotes Pali Capital analyst RIch Greenfield saying that part of the company’s problem is Murdoch’s sentimental attachment to old media:

If Murdoch wants to keep the business healthy, it is time to make “hard decisions” and prune older media like papers, Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield said.

… “It just feels like the legacy assets are weighing too heavily,” Greenfield added in an interview. “I think they’ve been the most aggressive in trying to develop businesses with long-term returns on capital … where others initially didn’t believe or thought the start-up costs were too high.”

Bloomberg’s story sees a writedown coming from a different angle:

Plunging DVD sales threaten to reduce profit for studio owners Time Warner Inc., Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp., and may force them to write down the value of movies, analysts said. …

The decline is being fueled by viewer shifts toward rental services such as Netflix Inc., the U.S. recession and technology that makes it easier to stream Web videos to televisions.

“Making a movie just won’t be as profitable as it once was,” Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente in New York said in an interview. “There will be a complete bottoms-up reconstruction of the economics of the film business.”

Curiously enough, most of the Wall Street analysts who have been fueling the bad-news-about-News Corp trend are keeping their “buy” and “hold” recommendations on the stock. That acknowledges that News Corp is a bet for folks with a long-term point of view when it comes to media stocks. Murdoch has pulled the company from the brink before so perhaps there’s no reason that he couldn’t again.

Facebook is hot, MySpace is not.  We didn’t say it, Yahoo’s new chief executive Carol Bartz did.

During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, one analysts asked Bartz what Yahoo’s strategy is for going after the younger demographic, i.e. the generation whose lives play out on social networks.

“That was one of the questions I asked the (Yahoo) board when I was speaking to them in November and December,” Bartz replied. “I have a 20-year-old and also two kids in their late 20s, so I’m very familiar with the Facebooks of the world and before that, MySpace, and see what the kids do. So I’m very curious about that demographic.”

As for Yahoo’s plans to go after the 15-25 age group, Bartz had two caveats on how aggressively the web company should pursue youngsters:

“They do grow up, and it’s interesting watching the older ones… they’re much more interested in looking at Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News. They don’t have all day to (put up) pictures on Facebook and chat constantly because guess what, they’re off the dole.”

And her second thought:

“The good news is that (this) crowd is very finicky — just as MySpace was extremely hot and then it moved over to Facebook, who knows what’s gonna come next and who knows whether Yahoo can grab that property and be successful.”

Fighting talk.

Photo: Reuters

Years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, Yahoo! sponsored a small cafe where festivalgoers could drop in -- if they were on the list -- and grab a quick bite to eat. But over time, it seems Yahoo's fame and fortune as an Internet portal have receded, and in it's place popped up social networking site MySpace. And in recent years, MySpace has sponsored the cafe at Sundance.

Now, it seems that in its fifth year (2009) MySpace is facing the keen competitive threat of social networking site Facebook. So, when we sat down with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in the MySpace Cafe, we couldn't help but note the irony. Could MySpace be "Yahoo II: The Sequel"? (We couldn't resist the movie pun. It is Sundance, after all). DeWolfe laughed. He doesn't see it that way at all and, in fact, he said the outlook for MySpace appears bright.

"During the first half of our fiscal year, we are up (in revenues) year over year, and we're profitable. We're cautiously optimistic over the next 6 months," he said about the business climate. "The overall advertising marketing, in general, both online and offline is softening ... how that affects us in three or four months is really difficult to say ... (but) the economic downturn during Bear Stearns and the financial crisis, we've done great through all that, and again we're up year over year."

DeWolfe noted that currently MySpace has 76 million unique users in the U.S. to Facebook's roughly 46 million. He added that MySpace is the No. 1-trafficked Web site in the U.S. And yes, Facebook was growing but so was MySpace. He talked about Facebook being a good site for communications, while MySpace focused on being a place for pop culture lovers, movies, music, video and such. "We're focused much more broadly. It's much more than e-mail and an address book. It's people, content and culture ... talk to anyone in the creative community, and they love MySpace," DeWolfe said.

To that end, husband-and-wife acting duo Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore will launch, this Monday on MySpace, a video featuring more than 50 Hollywood celebrities who have answered President-elect Barack Obama's call for community service by pledging to take positive action on social causes and encouraging others to do so.

So, maybe MySpace's future is secure. Time will tell. But if it is, that would be a positive in one sense, at least, because after having been at both Sundance cafes -- Yahoo! and MySpace -- I'd say MySpace takes the cake.

We recently wrote that advertisers have even more riding on this Super Bowl than usual. There may be no better illustration of this than Anheuser-Busch InBev, brewer of such Super Bowl marketing staples as Bud and Bud Light.

Yesterday, the company gave the press a glimpse of some of its advertising for this year’s big game. The company has purchased 4-1/2 minutes worth of advertising time, once again making it the biggest Super Bowl advertiser.

At first glimpse, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s plans don’t seem that different than other years. It will go for humor in Bud Light spots and emotion in its Budweiser spots, using the Clydesdale horses. (Actually, it will run a record 3 Clydesdale commercials during the game).

But you get a sense from company executives that they feel like there is a lot riding on this year’s marketing blitz, given it comes during a recession when all budgets –  including, and perhaps especially, advertising — are under close scrutiny. Tossing a few million bucks at some commercial time is no easy decision right now.

Moreoever, the company has to rebuild some bridges after the rush of bad publicity that came with the takevoer last year by InBev (Think foreign super-company taking over American beer icon and you’ll get a sense how this thing was being played).

Executives acknowledged that with the takeover they want to remind the consumer that Budweiser is still that same proud, traditional beer.  

“That’s one of the things people are going to be looking for from Anheuser-Busch. It’s ‘Hey, what are you going to change?’” said Keith Levy, vice president of marketing. “The best thing we can do as marketers of a 133-year-old brand, in the case of Budweiser, is reassure them that the things they’ve grown accustomed to and love and feel are relevant still remain.”

We’ll see. Just a couple more weeks until kickoff.

Keep an eye on:

• The world financial crisis has produced more than its share of losers. MySpace and other online social networks want to capitalize on them (Reuters)
• Yahoo Inc’s new Chief Executive Carol Bartz will receive a compensation package of about $19 million in 2009, in addition to a bonus and stock options (Reuters)
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition Thursday night, the latest victim of the industry’s huge problems (StarTribune.com)