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.

Last week we reported on the two-headed force of social media and online video propelling advertisers in the UK to a record spend for 2010. While we wait for the audited US online ad spend numbers to come out in the coming weeks, here’s further evidence of the importance of online video to the marketing world.

In October, we noticed an interesting trend forming: social media, and in particular, Facebook, over the first half of 2010 was driving the UK’s resurgent online ad market. New numbers are in this morning and the story hasn’t changed: the social media ad spend grew at a staggering 200% rate last year to help the online display ad sector nearly crack the £1 billion mark.

The Internet Advertising Bureau released its latest audit of the U.S. online ad market and – surprise, surprise – it’s more record growth for the sector.

Yes, web users do view online video ads in their entirety, says a new study from a TV network that is trying to make money from online video ads. Well, most of the viewers do. Okay, the CW Television Network study may sound self-serving, but there are some interesting findingsthat point to what we already know: viewing online video (and the accompanying ads) is becoming a growth industry.

Online advertising continues to set new records, this time in the United States where the digital spend for the first half of 2010 exceeded $12.1 billion, reports the Internet Advertising Bureau. We reported earlier this month that in the UK spending on social media helped propel the total online ad spend. In the US, it was a different catalyst: online video.

Here’s some inspiring news for low-budget filmmakers and cash-strapped brands looking to get noticed. A new effectiveness study of online video shows that user-generated videos are in many ways as effective as slickly produced TV commercials, news that would hardly surprise your typical YouTube addict. Could this spell the end of the expensive commercial shoot?

Facebook has soared past Yahoo as the Number 2 place to watch online videos. More great news for the dominant social network? Well, maybe not: people still spend more time watching videos on Yahoo, and there are nagging doubts about how Facebook can actually make money from video content.

No doubt helped by the World Cup and the explosion in smartphone usage, mobile video consumption is booming in much of Europe with the UK and Italy leading the way, new comScore research shows. Roughly two-thirds of all smartphone users use the handset to view video, the data show, either via a mobile TV subscription or by accessing video-sharing sites (or, their apps) such as YouTube.

It could be just what couch potatoes everywhere have been waiting for – YouTube (as well as much of the rest of the Web) is coming to your TV, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced yesterday. Before you ready your Microsoft WebTV cracks, consider this: Americans alone view over 13 billion videos a month on YouTube. That’s a lot of eyeballs.