Your teenage nephew’s homemade videos may not win an award for creativity, or even clarity, but don’t dismiss the power of these amateur auteurs. A new ad effectiveness study shows that user-generated videos more than pull their weight when compared to the pros. They even drive sales.

The early tally is in. Despite the doom-and-gloom economic predictions, the 2011 holiday shopping season has gotten off to a record start. Online shopping and, dare we say it, the nascent social shopping sector is a major factor in what is shaping up to be a record holiday season.

The silly season is back. This Friday starts the annual countdown to make-or-break-dom for retailers. Already I’m seeing plenty of #BlackFriday chatter, with Best Buy paying out handsomely for the most sought-after hashtag of the year. Days later, it will be #CyberMonday.

Mobile-mad Europeans have truly become a consumer force, new research shows, as smartphones have now become a major traffic driver to retailers’ sites. The research also showed accessing social networks on the go is another favorite activity of smartphone users. As researchers point out, this is both a big opportunity and a major threat for brands.

It may just be that the Newsfeed, and not the fanpage, is the most valuable real estate on Facebook for marketers. So says new research jointly produced by Facebook and comScore that shows Facebook users are 40-150 more times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than they are by going to the fanpage. And, thanks to the power of the Newsfeed there’s a new way to calculate your potential social media reach.

Here’s a little charticle that might surprise you. We took the latest comScore web usage numbers, sifting through it to focus solely on Europe’s most popular social sites. The big winner hails from Mother Russia, not Palo Alto.

That’s the latest prediction from eMarketer which is factoring in an impressive 20.2% growth for the bellweather US online ad market for 2011, and more gains in the near future. This year, online ad revenue is expected to reach $31.3 billion on its way to almost $50 billion in 2015.

Online commerce is one of the few bright spots in retail, once again showing it’s the fastest growing segment in the sector. And what’s the fastest growing part of online commerce? It’s a two-part answer: social- and mobile-commerce, new studies once again show.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

One of the more controversial pieces of research we’d come across recently was one that showed the phenomenal recent success here in Europe of daily deals sites such as Groupon. Little surprise there. But the researchers concluded that their rise comes at a big cost – the sudden demise of business at eBay and online auctioneers. So we took the question straight to Rajen Ruparell, Director of Groupon UK: are you already writing the obituary of eBay here in Europe?