There’s a little something for everybody in the media industry in Frank N. Magid Associates’ annual study of user/viewer/reader behavior. We got a look at some of the findings and took especial note of stats on online video usage, research sponsored by video sharing site Metacafe.

Boiled down, YouTube is still king of online video watching, according to nearly 2,000 web users aged 12 to 64 surveyed by Magid Associates. But as online video becomes a part of our daily routine, corroding wholesome activities like watching TV and going to the movies, there should be plenty more room for sites like rival Metacafe or slick Hulu.

Here’s some of the data on the overarching trends. Magid managing director Mike Vorhaus attributes them to a growing appetite for “snack-sized content.” Now try to make some money off it:

* Half of those surveyed watch some type of online video weekly, more than 10 percent watch it daily.

* More male users aged 12 to 24 say they expect to watch online video more often in the next year.

* Comedy and music videos are the most commonly viewed web video content. News stories rank fourth, full-length movies come in 10th.

* More than 40 percent of online video viewers say they’d rather watch video content on their nice TV sets rather than a PC screen.

* 30 percent believe the Internet is the future of video viewing and 28 percent say they watch less TV because of their web video habits. 44 percent say they consider ads within online video clips as similar to ads in TV shows.

(Photo of prisoners in Manila dancing during an exercise program, an act made famous by a video circulated online. Reuters)

Not hugely surprising, but CBS commissioned a study showing that watching full-length shows online won’t destroy television viewership, and it will attract a younger audience.

The study of 50,000 people, commissioned by the network and conducted by Magid Media Labs, polled viewers who have watched full episodes of CBS shows across the company’s partners in the CBS Audience Network.

The findings:

• Median age of online viewers: 38
• 35 percent of online watchers say they are now more likely to watch CBS on TV after finding shows online.
• About 46 percent say they only or mostly watch online.
• Half of respondents recalled the brand of an ad they saw during the online show.
• About 18 percent of those who remembered an ad that they saw during the online show said it played a role in their choosing to buy something. That number rose to 31 percent for consumer packaged goods.

In other words, TV networks have nothing to lose. The cable networks, which rely on affiliate fees from cable operators, on the other hand …

(Photo: Reuters)

The economy might be in trouble but advertisers and publishers at the Online Publisher Association’s Forum for the Future were still upbeat today about the prospects for online advertising.

“The first thing people need to do is to decaffeinate some of those expectations (about the economic outlook),” Rapt CEO Tom Chavez said during a State of Advertising panel discussion at the OPA’s meeting in London.

As more people move online, the market will grow despite economic doldrums. Carline Little, CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive conceded a “recession is going to hit any advertising-supported media but as people move online, we’ll see increases - but not as big as we saw four or five years ago. ”

eMarketer founder Geoff Ramsey helped cut through the clutter of conflicting statistics about key trends in online advertising, social networking and virtual worlds.

Video advertising is likely to grab the lion’s share of online advertising in the future, he said. Marketers are already starting to shift their budgets to video, which could reach $2.5bn by 2012 in the US alone. Some publishers said increasing video advertising was their number one priority for 2008, although a straw poll around the conference room in London did not show a large number of hands among the audience of around 200.

Combining online video with behavioural targeting is one key strategy, as long as you stay in the real world. Second Life, Ramsay said, is not a “mass-reach vehicle.” Out of its 13 million residents, only 877,000 use the site every month and most corporate locations attract less than 500 visitors a day.

Britain leads the pack when it comes to spending on online advertising - the spend per head is $143.48 compared to $112.17 in the United States, Ramsey pointed out. China, with the world’s biggest Internet population, is at just over $5 for now.

But, advertisers have to work harder to gain their audience’s trust. Trust in the industry has fallen to 17 percent of consumers in 2007 from 25 percent in 2005, behind the legal industry and only slightly ahead of tobacco, according to research from DoubleClick.

When consumers were asked how much they trusted specific types of advertising, mobile ads scored the lowest at 18 percent, followed by banner ads at 26 percent, search at 34 percent, and TV and magazines at 56 percent. But hearing about products through friends and family was most trusted at 78 percent.

One way of exploiting such data is to focus increasingly on advertising on social networks, such as Facebook , where users provide valuable information about themselves for advertisers. But that poses its own challenges. Data from the U.S. showed that 54 percent of social network users said they never click on an ad and 80 percent said they would not add a brand as a friend.

Ramsey pinpointed the trends that are likely to shape the outlook for e-marketers:

• Google will do with phones what they did to the Web, “no question about it.”
• As consumers use of mobile devices rise, marketers will need to look for cross-media properties that allow consumers to interact with brands, while on the go.
• Search is not as big as we might think. How do people think of what to search for? Think brands, not search, stupid.