Video drives video. Among online video viewers, about 44% of TV viewers and 31% of moviegoers say watching a preview was the biggest factor in seeing the flick or checking out the show, according to online video technology provider Videology. To be sure, this finding isn't rocket science. But it is a powerful reminder that online video is a vital tool for TV networks as well as movie studies to use widely and often.

For the first time ever, YouTube has surpassed Hulu in video ads served. According to comScore's just-released June 2012 Video Metrix, Google-owned sites delivered 1.41 billion ads in June, the most of any Web property. Brightroll was next at 1.39 billion, and Hulu landed in the third slot at 1.33 billion. The top five also included Adap.tv with 1.15 billion video ads and TubeMogul with 1.04 billion video ads. A year ago, YouTube hadn't even registered on comScore's ranking of top 10 properties by video ads served.

No wonder television networks are wringing their hands over their social TV strategies. With the news from Pew this week that nearly half of cell phone users are on their phones while viewing TV, it's understandable that broadcasters would be in a pickle about how to leverage this new behavior.

Cable and satellite viewers don't have a clue they can watch shows from their providers anywhere besides the TV, but they sure know how to find videos to watch on their mobile devices. A recent Parks Associates survey found that only 20% of pay-TV customers know about TV Everywhere options from their service provider as of the first quarter of this year, and of those who did about half use it once a month. These numbers should be concerning to service providers, especially given that consumers are already aware of and actively watching TV on mobile devices --presumably content they …

Digital advertising venues offer a plethora of data for marketers to mine, but there's still not enough to prove ROI, including for online video. That's the finding of a survey of more than 200 marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers this spring. The study released Monday and revealed that even as new media advertising on mobile phones, social media and online video grows, marketers still aren't terribly confident in these platforms.

Pre-rolls are the dominant form of online video advertising, but display ads still rule the Web in general. So it's natural for technologists to look for ways to build video into all those omnipresent banner ads. One of the latest efforts comes from social video platform VideoGenie, which has rolled out a new ad unit that marries user-generated video and display ads.

Internet video has a secret weapon to drive video views, and it's a tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of. Metadata. Sure, the word sounds unsexy, but just add some text to a video and voila! It returns higher in search, it's found more easily -- and oh, yeah, advertisers can better target video ads to content.

I love numbers. I love statistics. I love any and all benchmarks for online video. Digital advertising is a business that's differentiated by its ability to adroitly measure virtually any aspect of a campaign, a brand, a trend. So if you dig charts too, then bookmark SocialBakers.com, a social monitoring service that measures which brands are ticking up on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social sharing venues on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

TV advertising may still command billions of dollars each year, but its growth will be largely flat over the next few years. So marketers should seek out connected TV opportunities to keep growing the video ad market, according to an IHS Screen Digest report commissioned by ad management platform VideoPlaza that's slated to release today. The report focuses on the United States and on Western Europe including France, UK, Spain, Italy and Germany.

American video consumers are able to shoehorn a lot of traditional TV viewing, mobile phone watching, and online video-ing into their waking hours, as evidenced by Netflix's newest viewing stat, coupled with fresh research on multichannel services.