In a way, today is a big day for Hulu. The popular video site will soon likely attract a huge number of views based on two shows that return to television this evening – NBC’s The Office and FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. These two have been huge hits for Hulu in the past, and that will likely continue as the two programs begin pushing out new episodes.

The series premiere of The Office will make its Hulu debut on Friday September 18th, but It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans will unfortunately have to wait until Friday September 25th to catch the premiere of the show’s fifth season on the site. Once it makes its appearance, however, I would expect plenty of views (and ad views).

Web searchers are obviously awaiting both of these shows, as they both appear in Google’s Hot Trends list at the time of this writing. "Sunny" is at number 24, surprisingly way ahead of The Office, which is at 93.

Way up at number 8, however, is "thursday night football schedule," indicating what people really want to watch tonight. The only game on tonight is Georgia Tech vs. Miami on ESPN (and on the web at ESPN360.com), but I would expect it to get pretty good ratings, if the amount of web interest in football is any indication.

Last month, football-related sites saw some of the biggest gains in web traffic, as shown by the Compete 250. NFL.com ranked among the month’s biggest gainers, growing 123% and reaching 6.5 million unique visitors, while individual team sites saw tremendous uptick, and fantasy football sites attracted 43.8% more traffic than in July.

InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

Michael Jackson was launched way ahead after he died. Currently, the Michael Jackson page has 10,006,304 fans. Before he died, he only had over 800,000. At that point, President Obama was the leader, but now he sits in 2nd place with 6,487,191. Here’s a look at the top 30 according to InsideFacebook’s data:

Then there are the current biggest gainers:

And the current biggest losers:

It’s interesting to see that Pop Tarts are on their way up, while the guy that successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River is losing fans. It makes you wonder what Toaster Strudels are working on to up their game.

The information here may seem like the results of a popularity contest, but InsideFacebook’s data is worth keeping an eye on simply to see what brands are making it in the popular categories. If you are still looking for successful ways to utilize Facebook for marketing your business, you can see what brands are successfully gaining fans, and look at what they’re doing right.