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According to a new study by market research firm ComScore, the majority of U.S. Internet users would use the iPad to surf the web (50%), send and read emails (48%) and listen to music (38%). Only 26% of respondents told ComScore that they were likely to download apps from the iTunes store and only 22% plan to play action, strategy and role playing games.

According to the latest data from comScore, Internet users over the age of 15 conducted over 29 million searches per minute in 2009. Overall, the global search market grew 46% in 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google continues to have a commanding lead in this market. Worldwide, Google accounted for 66% of all searches conducted in 2009 by Internet users over 15. Microsoft's search properties, including Bing, commanded only about 3% of the total market, but Microsoft also saw the greatest gain (70%) among the top 5 search properties. In total, comScore estimates that Internet users now conduct close to 131 billion searches per year.

ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.

Flurry announced the partnership on the heels of its merger with Pinch Media last month. The service boasts a nearly ubiquitous presence in the mobile market and will add a host of real-time data to comScore's reports.

After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote.

July turned out to be the biggest month for watching Internet video yet. According to comScore, Internet users in the US watched 21.4 billion videos in July, up 88% from last year. Google's YouTube streamed 9 billion of these videos, followed by video sites from Viacom and Microsoft. In terms of unique users, YouTube gets only twice as many visitors as Microsoft's video sites. On YouTube, however, people watched an average of 74 videos in July, while they watched only around 10 videos on Microsoft's sites and 19 on Viacom's online video properties.

Yesterday, we reported that Nielsen Online's April numbers showed that the number of unique streams on Hulu grew 7.9% since March, though the number of unique users dropped slightly to about 7.4 million. As the New York Times reports this morning, however, Hulu questions these numbers and argues that they grossly underestimate Hulu's real reach, which comScore, another online measurement firm, pegs at 42 million.

According to comScore, the number of people who accessed news and information sites from their mobile phones in the U.S. more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. ComScore estimates that about 63 million people accessed mobile news and information sites from their mobile devices in January 2009, and about a third of these did so on a daily basis. The mobile Internet is clearly becoming a mainstream phenomenon, though it needs to be noted that a large number of these users don't use the mobile Web, but rely on SMS-based services.

Traffic analysts estimate 5 billion US video views in July for YouTube alone.

Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?

Digg is in big trouble. We already know that Yahoo! Buzz, a beta social news service by Yahoo!, can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites. We also know the ongoing problems at competitor digg, which continue to be skated around by digg management. Now we have proof that Yahoo! Buzz is kicking some digg behind in terms of stats. According to a new report from comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than digg - Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg. We have graphs below from comScore...