Chances are you already know.

According to a new report by Internet research firm comScore, nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a seven percent increase over the previous year. Online video has also become an increasingly important channel for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53 percent in the past year.

“What’s also interesting is that Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by ‘snacking’ on these news updates throughout the workday,” says comScore executive VP Jack Flanagan. “In fact, nearly half of all time spent on entertainment news sites comes from work computers.”

comScore estimates that more than a quarter of U.S. Internet users visited an entertainment news site in May 2009. Leading the way was Yahoo’s celebrity gossip site, omg! with 20.6 million visitors, nearly doubling its audience in the past year.

TMZ captured the #2 ranking with 9.9 million visitors (up 7 percent versus year ago), followed by People with 8.2 million visitors.

(PHOTO CREDIT: TMZ.com).

Other big gainers include USmagazine.com, up 325 percent to 6.5 million visitors, Entertainment Weekly, up 64 percent to nearly 4 million visitors, and The Insider, which grew 215 percent to 2.5 million visitors.

Celebrity overload

I noticed USmagazine was getting so much action today the site was briefly inaccessible. A message on the site explaining the outage said: “Sorry, we’ve gone into celebrity overload!”

Not surprising. In total, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes - or approximately 15 million hours - on entertainment news sites, with 44 percent of the total time spent in the category occurring at, yes, you guessed it, the workplace.

BTW, if like me you’re not familiar with OMG!, don’t assume it’s at www.omg.com. That Web site belongs, in fact to the Object Management Group that helps develop enterprise integration standards and could lead you to do actual work.

OMG!