According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, a lot of people are ready to shell out the dough for the new iPhone when it drops – not just current Apple customers.

He made some projections based on a survey of 216 mobile phone users and decided that the huge demand for the iPhone 5 could translate to Apple doubling their market share – a market that is currently controlled by Android OS mobile devices.

Here’s what the makeup of the survey group looks like – 29% currently own iPhones (3G, 3Gs or 4 not specified), 17% currently own Android phones and 28% currently own a BlackBerry. The rest own other types of phones.

Of everyone in the survey, 64% said that they plan on buying an iPhone 5. 60% said that they are simply waiting for the iPhone 5 to come out, and that they will buy it then even if their current phone is still working and their contract is still valid. If only 29% of respondents currently own an iPhone, this means that a giant percentage of non-iPhone users want to make the switch.

In fact, 42% of Android OS users said they will probably switch to iOS when the iPhone 5 drops. In contrast, only 6% of iOS users said they would be switching to Android when they purchase their next phone.

94% of iPhone users plan on buying another iPhone. That’s some customer satisfaction.

The iPhone 5 might also help Verizon specifically – of the 55% of non-iPhone users that expect to buy an iPhone, 74% said that they were waiting on the iPhone 5.

Will the iPhone 5 bring Apple closer to market supremacy?

The latest buzz about the device in question is that it will have a slightly larger display than the 4 and a thinner bezel. Some reports point to an October 1st release date, a little later than the previously discussed mid-September release date.

For a more in-depth roundup of today’s iPhone 5 buzz, check out this rumors article.

Don’t look for the rise to the halfway mark to happen all at once.  The report explained, "We estimate Google will control 14.9% of the smartphone market through Android in 2010, growing to 23.2% in 2012."

Meanwhile, Apple’s market share is also supposed to increase, hitting 17.6 percent in 2012.

Here’s the key thing, though: according to Larry Dignan, Piper Jaffray stated, "Ultimately, we believe Android is likely to control over half of the smartphone market in the next five years. . . .  and we believe ultimately Apple’s smartphone market share tops out between 20-30% . . ."

That’s a strong endorsement of what Google’s doing in the mobile space.  It could be a sign that Apple’s in trouble, too, since the company’s surely tried to convince analysts of a brighter outlook.

Apple beat Google in one sense today, anyway, since its stock dropped just 0.37 percent while Google’s fell 1.25 percent.

Yes, you can bet that Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster just made himself a little more welcome at the Googleplex than ThinkEquity’s William Morrison.  According to Rory Maher, Munster looked at the top 100 clips on YouTube during a week and found, "29 percent of videos had an ad versus 25 percent in January and 30 percent in December."

Such a quick bounceback following the holiday season is impressive.  Also, "72 percent of the ads displayed were in-video ads versus 52 percent in January and 63 percent in December," so YouTube’s making progress in that corner, too.

Finally, Adidas, Chevy, Disney, Kraft, Verizon, and Xbox have apparently decided to test YouTube’s advertising waters, which means the video-sharing arm of Google is in contact with some very deep budgets.

If YouTube can sustain these trends without alienating users, harsh comments concerning its profitability might have to stop, and comparisons between it and Hulu may take on a different tone.

William Shatner
Priceline Negotiator

Given the near-constant talk of recessions and bubble-bursting, it’s almost surprising that there are such things as Internet top picks; most sites don’t have much to do with water, food, or shelter.  Priceline’s savings-oriented setup may have helped it rise to the top, though.

Also, our economic problems haven’t affected everyone in the world.  "International travel (especially Europe to U.S.) is becoming a larger part of Priceline’s business, and should help Priceline continue to outpace industry growth," Piper Jaffray analyst Aaron Kessler told Reuters.

Priceline’s stock is down this morning, but the same can be said for almost the entire market.  Priceline had a good day yesterday, and over the past six months, its stock has risen.  The Dow and Nasdaq have not.

All in all, Priceline’s on quite a streak, and even people who don’t travel and have no investments should appreciate it.  Here’s why: perhaps the company will avoid changing anything, and as a result, produce more Shatner commercials.

"While we do remain concerned with the macro economic concerns (housing, oil, retail sales, unemployment, and slowdown in corporate spending), we continue to expect most Internet companies to continue to deliver solid fundamentals and believe that valuations are currently discounting much of the economic concerns," a new report states.

Getting still more specific, the Piper Jaffray report (excerpts of which appear in MediaPost) also indicates, "Whereas Internet advertising budgets were the first to be cut during the market crash in 2000, we believe the proven high ROI of online advertising today will make online advertising resilient even with a recession in the United States."

Admittedly, some experts pointed to a bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble long before many other economic problems came to light.  Also, Google’s stock has declined by about $60 per share in the last month, and it’s at the center of Piper Jaffray’s predictions.

Meh, who knows.  If you’ve got some spare time, maybe it’s best to start excavating the backyard, just in case.

Boy, wish we’d have noticed that before Piper Jaffray put out this 425-page report (PDF). Oh yeah, we kind of did, notice it a lot, but we’ll get to back-patting later. The report, entitled The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium, coins the latest buzzword "communitainment" after exploring the upheaval currently in progress.

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, took one for the team and weeded through the report before penning a succinct summary over at Search Engine Watch. "After several years of moving at a healthy pace along well-traveled pathways, the search engine industry seems to be sailing off in surprising new directions," he writes.

The comprehensive report is the result of a year’s worth of research led by Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior Internet analyst, and Aaron Kessler, VP and senior Internet analyst, and is the firm’s outline of how they believe advertising and media models will change over the next couple of decades.

Jarboe quotes an email from them:

"Consider this report as a warning of a storm that has already formed, a storm that will destroy many models and create new ones. Luckily, the full cycle of the storm will still take a few more years to complete, and there is still time to react."

The short and skinny: The user revolution has gone mainstream and is causing increased media fragmentation, putting search, as a portal, at the forefront of branding, and video ads will be funding it all.

It’s good to see this spark of recognition from outside the online marketing world. For the longest time, SEM was considered, from both sides of the fence, quite separate from traditional media and traditional marketing/advertising/branding. Search marketers, at times still, scoffed at branding concepts that didn’t produce direct, measurable results, even if this is the way the advertising world has worked for decades. Ask Coca-Cola.

But traditional Madison Avenue types have also been slow to accept the power of search marketing, and, more recently, the power of user-generated media. Both sides, though, are starting to get it: it’s all going to be one big media orgy one day anyway, might as well start smooching.

We could go into specifics about how this orgiastic revolution will take place, but we’d just be repeating ourselves. Instead, consider this an abridged index of sheer, conceited prescience:

Sweet-Talking The Searcher

YouTube Users and Video Ads

YouTube Optimization

Pure Unresolved Speculation

Google and TV Ads

YouTube Vs. TV

Online Video Reach

What Google Could Do Nielsen

Don’t Expect the FCC to Stay Out of It

Madison Ave. Doesn’t Get Web Video

Online Gaming

Google and In-game Advertising

Quantum Physics and Viral Marketing

Search Engines and Time Reality (just for fun)

Google Media, Inc., 20 years later…

Advertisers Late To the Big Dance

Portals, Google’s One Of Them

Google Should Come Out of Portal Closet

Mainstream Media Afraid Of Blogs

What Bloggers Like

The Associated Blogosphere

Branding In The Age of Wikipedia

Branding Through Social Media

Branding In the Red Light District

Branding In France

Podcasting, Blogging, Monetization

The Googleconomy

That’s all of the horn-tooting for today.