On Monday the internet research firm comScore published a review of the major digital trends of 2009 in the U.S., and, although internet usage in Canada can be quite different, the report still has some interesting insights for digital producers at the CBC.

1. Video Viewing is Fragmenting: Video viewing is still growing dramatically, “The average online viewer consumed 187 videos in December 2009 (up 95 percent vs. year ago), while the duration of the average video viewed grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes,” the report said. This growth is reflected in sites like Hulu.

^{A great big blue hill of growth}

The growth of sites like Hulu, and many others, reflects the fragmentation of the online video market. Although Youtube still accounts for more than a quarter of video viewing, you see the long tail effect taking hold, for the first time the majority of online video viewing is happening on sites that aren’t the top 25 video sites. This could have an impact on video portals like the CBC’s Video page, and much smaller show sites as the online video consumer becomes more accustomed to viewing video on many different sites.

2. Myspace is Still Huge, Twitter not so Much: The other major point that surprised me is how much of the social networking pie Myspace captures. The view that Myspace is on its way out seems pretty common these days, but as you can see the graph below, it’s still huge (at least in the U.S., in Canada it’s probably different), and it’s way bigger than Twitter.

For the CBC this raises a couple important questions: how many Twitter accounts does the CBC have? More than a 100 I’d guess. How many Myspace pages? I bet less than ten.

Further to this point the young end of the Myspace audience is growing “people age 24 and younger now comprising 44.4 percent of the site’s audience, up more than 7 percentage points from the previous year,” the report said. The percentage of Facebook visitors in the same demographic actually declined 5 per cent from 2008. This is key information you’re trying to attract younger viewers and you’re scratching your head on the best approach. It’s also makes you wonder whether the CBC is devoting too much energy to Twitter and too little to Myspace.

3. Smartphones: The final point that jumped out was the market switch to smartphones, and how that will impact online content consumption in the years ahead; but I’d rather not comment on that too much because the smartphone market in the U.S. is way different from Canada. Maybe someone can point to some good Canadian research on this?

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