BlackBerry owns a commanding 42% share of US smartphone subscribers (and a 9% share of the total subscriber population), according to July data from comScore, and globally, BlackBerry shipments rose 45% from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010. So why has the introduction of its newest smartphone, the Torch, and version 6 of its proprietary operating system been described as a make-or-break moment for BlackBerry?

First off, Research In Motion (RIM) may hold the lead among US smartphone subscribers, but it certainly isn’t gaining share. At best, RIM is managing to tread water while other platforms, most notably Android, surge ahead. Globally, Canalys projects 169% year-over-year growth in Android smartphone shipments in 2010 and 100% year-over-year growth in total market share. RIM, by contrast, is forecast to lose six points of market share.

Second, and perhaps more worrisome for RIM, is BlackBerry users’ lack of loyalty to the platform. In findings released this week, Nielsen revealed that only 42% of current BlackBerry owners would opt for another BlackBerry as their next smartphone, while 29% want an iPhone and 21% have their eyes on an Android device.

Now, had Nielsen’s survey sample included only dedicated business users, who constitute the core of the BlackBerry faithful, the results might have looked somewhat different. But that highlights the very challenge BlackBerry faces in the market today: with more mobile users, including both consumers and business users, consolidating their communication, media consumption and social networking activities on a single device, the line between business and personal is rapidly eroding. And that means smartphones need to be really good at many things, not just really good for e-mail, which has historically been BlackBerry’s strong suit.

When the competition includes the iPhone 4, HTC EVO 4G, Motorola Droid X, Samsung Galaxy S and others in the annoyingly termed “superphone” class, BlackBerry devices seem desperately short on the “wow” factor: good enough for the faithful, but not appealing enough to attract new users to the fold. That was the consensus among analysts polled by FierceWireless. Leading tech journalists had a mixed reaction, but at best, RIM seems to have caught up with its rivals. There are few voices to suggest this latest BlackBerry surpasses the other leading smartphones on the market.

It will be interesting to watch whether the Torch and OS6 light the way as a new direction for RIM or whether the BlackBerry platform will continue to suffer from the perception that it is stagnating in the face of increasingly fierce competition in the smartphone market.

In order to venture a guess (and this is just a guess–there’s not a lot of data out there on this), let’s start with Nielsen’s estimate that 120 million people in the US watched at least some portion of the 2006 World Cup on TV.

Let’s assume that the TV audience for the 2010 Cup will be bigger. Why? Because (1) soccer has grown in popularity in the US in the past four years; (2) the US team is expected to be stronger this year, and its opening match matchup against England will be the highest profile World Cup game the US has played since it faced Germany in 2002; and (3) because the marketing machine is spinning in a higher gear than the last time around.

The cumulative audience for the World Cup was about 120 million in 2006, I expect this year it might be on the order of 150 million. And I’m going to assume that some 5% of the total viewing audience will watch games online. This percentage is a bit higher than for the 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament (which was around 3.2% streaming) for good reason. The World Cup appeals to an extremely broad-based constituency, many of whom are foreigners whose employers won’t “get” what the fuss is about. These folks will do anything to catch their games, even if it means taking an extended lunch and watching on a laptop at a local café. (In England, where many employers do “get” it, this has already caused problems.)

It helps that all games take place before or during business hours in the US. There will be no evening games, so that will push more of the audience toward streaming solutions.

So what’s the estimated size of the online audience for the World Cup? I expect the total US online streaming video audience will be somewhere around 7.5 million for this year’s event. Keep in mind that it’s not an official estimate — and it doesn’t count the tens of millions who will catch post-game streams and highlight reels on YouTube, ESPN.com, Univision.com, FIFA.com and other entities that will carry these clips.

Still, the implications are interesting when compared to other sporting events in the US, like the NCAA tournament. Contrary to popular belief that Americans generally don’t care for soccer, it appears that the World Cup will be watched by double the number of US viewers who watched March Madness streaming live on CBS.com this year. According to Nielsen, just 3.2 million unique viewers watched the NCAA tournament streaming online this year — less than half the number who are expected to watch the World Cup in the same fashion.

One potential factor that might limit the World Cup streaming audience is the nature of the digital rights. ESPN/ABC and Univision have English- and Spanish-language broadcast rights, respectively, and those rights extend to the Web. ESPN’s streaming service, ESPN3.com, is available only on ISPs that are affiliated with ABC and its parent company, Disney. That includes Comcast, AT&T and Verizon but does not include Time Warner Cable and others. So many fans in entire swaths of the country will not be able to watch live streams in English even if they’re willing to pay. They’ll have to either watch on Univision.com or go underground.

A big day: Experian Hitwise announced that social networks attracted more UK online traffic than search engines in May 2010. Since May of last year, social network visits have climbed from about 10% of all UK site visits to 11.88% of the total. During the same time, traffic to search engines fell from about 12% to 11.33% of all visits.

Google UK remained the most popular site overall among UK Web users, representing more than 90% of searches in May, said Hitwise. But Facebook ranked second in popularity, and accounted for 55% of all UK traffic to social network sites. YouTube claimed 16.5% of social network traffic, and Twitter placed third, with just over 2%.

These Hitwise results bear out some of the first rankings from the recently launched UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), which bases its audience estimates on Nielsen panel data. UKOM found that Google was indeed the top Web brand in April 2010, attracting 35.3 million unique visitors. The combined audience of Microsoft’s MSN, Windows Live and Bing search engine registered 28.3 million users, ahead of Facebook with 25 million.

These audience figures go some way to explaining why Facebook is also being widely credited with saving the display ad industry virtually single-handed. According to comScore’s Ad Metrix, the leading social network delivered almost 21 million display impressions to UK Web users in March 2010. That was more than 30% of all display ads served that month, comScore reported.

Several recent reports have drawn some interesting conclusions about the online advertising market in the Asia-Pacific region. The takeaway: Things are heating up much faster than expected.

The Nielsen Company recently reported double digit growth for Q1 2010 advertising spending in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand over the same period in 2009. Ad spending in the first quarter of 2010 totaled IDR13.2 trillion ($1.27 billion), NT$9.9 billion ($299.5 million) and THB22.79 billion ($664.4 million), respectively. Out of those three countries, Indonesia recorded the highest growth at 26%, followed by Taiwan (22.8%) and Thailand (10.8%).

Online ad spending led the rebound in Thailand, growing 68.29%, mostly due to lower levels of investment. It’s important to note that Nielsen Indonesia did not include online advertising and Taiwan did not separate out figures on Internet ad sales from its total advertising spending.

Nielsen’s Hong Kong office also recently reported that online ad revenues reached HK$255 million ($32.7 million in US dollars) in Q4 2009 to boost full year spending to HK$869 million ($111.4 million US). The total number of advertisers and campaigns more than doubled from Q4 2008 to Q4 2009, signaling an acceptance of online ads among advertisers in Hong Kong.

The Interactive Advertising Bureaus of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore also recently released their latest data for total advertising spending, with the Web leading the way. Online advertising in Australia was up 17% in the first quarter of 2010 year-over-year, propelled by a surge in search and directory spending. In May, IAB New Zealand reported a 12.3% increase in Q1 2010 and IAB Singapore estimates that online spending grew 30.2% from the first half of 2008 through the first half of 2009.

I know it’s quite a bit of data to digest in a short blog post, but it boils down to one point: Online advertising saw sustained growth throughout Asia-Pacific, compared to a 9.8% contraction in total advertising spending worldwide from 2008 to 2009 as estimated by ZenithOptimedia.

It’s not anything new to say that Asia is a huge opportunity for marketers looking to reach out overseas to seemingly untapped masses. The region’s exploding mobile market, for example, offers plenty of potential for advertisers. (There are more mobile Internet users in China right now than there are people living in the United States. If that’s not potential I don’t know what is.) What this data does show, however, is that online advertising is booming in the Asian market, and for the first time, marketers won’t be able to count on Asia being “untapped” much longer, at least online.

Note: All currency conversions were made using the average 2009 exchange rate.

The UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) published its first detailed figures on UK Internet users’ online behavior on May 19, 2010. The data relates to usage in April.

UKOM, launched earlier this year, was set up to deliver a common currency of information about Internet audiences in the UK, comparable to offline metrics such as the TV audience figures from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB). This will enable marketers and media planners to assess more clearly the targeted reach and frequency achieved by digital ads, and should help preserve the positive momentum of online ad spending in the UK—up 5.7% in 2009, according to the Advertising Association and the World Advertising Research Center.

The scheme has had overwhelming buy-in from agencies, publishers and other industry firms, according to UKOM, although its software product and user interface will not be finalized until the second half of this year.

The first raft of UKOM results indicated that UK Web users spent 884 million hours online in April 2010—65% more than in April 2007. Almost 23% of that time was apparently spent on social networks and blogs, with the number of hours rising from 40 million to 176 million in three years.

The next most popular categories after social networks and blogs were personal e-mail (56 million hours in April 2010) and online games (53 million hours).

Portals, often thought to be in permanent decline, put in a surprisingly good showing; UKOM found that UK Web users spent 31 million hours on sites such as Yahoo! and MSN in April 2010.