Internet users trust websites 20 percent more than they did 5 years ago and this is largely due to websites being more attractive or ‘pretty’, according to a new University of Melbourne study.

According to Dr. Brent Coker, of the University’s Faculty of Business and Economics, the increase in online consumer trust is largely due to the visual appeal of websites. Dr Coker said:

Is the online casino industry consolidating? Or is CasinoRewards.com gambling on its acquisition of no less than seven (7) online casinos? (I couldn’t resist the pun).

CasinoRewards.com has just announced the acquisition of GrandHotelCasino.com, LuxuryCasino.com, ColosseumCasino.com, VegasSlotCasino.com, Vegas7Casino.com, VegasCountryCasino.com and VegasJokerCasino.com. The acquisitions bring CasinoRewards.com’s portfolio of online gambling websites to a total of 32 brands.

The huge popularity of daily deal websites may have you thinking that consumers spend all day on the Internet, searching for local daily deals. According to PriceGrabber, however, 63 percent of U.S. online shoppers spend less than 30 minutes per day browsing daily deal sites.

Most local daily deal consumers, it seems, are efficient, if frequent, shoppers.

Where do U.S. hotels, bed and breakfasts (B & Bs) and innkeepers spend most of their marketing budgets these days? If you’re involved in the travel industry – or have recently researched or booked travel – you’ll know the answer: on the Internet!

Of the three biggest marketing expenses among accommodation businesses, the biggest expense is online advertising and the third is online travel agency commissions.

Hotel brand managers should impose stricter terms on their affiliates and channel partners, who, according to MarkMonitor, are ‘brandjacking’ hotels to the tune of $1.9 billion in lost annual online bookings.

Based on recent research conducted by the firm, MarkMonitor reckons affiliates – particularly hotel aggregators – are effectively ‘brandjacking’ hotels by bidding on hotel brand terms in the search engines. According to MarkMonitor’s research, affiliates are costing the hotel industry around $1.9 billion in lost annual online bookings.

May 2011 research from InboxQ indicates that Twitter users want businesses to respond to them when they have questions, complaints or comments about those businesses.

Interestingly, such Twitter users don’t necessarily direct their Tweets to a given company with a @ reply or direct message. Instead, they’ll send the Tweet to all their followers. Yet, according to InboxQ, more than half (58 percent) of Twitter users still want the business to respond to them.

More than 4 out of 10 U.S. consumers (44 percent) use or search daily deal websites. At the same time, however, over half – 52 percent – are feeling overwhelmed by the number of daily deal emails they receive each day, according to research by PriceGrabber.

Based on surveying 2,088 U.S. online consumers in May 2011, PriceGrabber found that while 63 percent of consumers receive emails from two or more local deal websites a day, 60 percent of respondents also believe the daily deal industry is getting crowded with too many sites.

Owners of smartphones download an average of three (3) shopping-related applications to their device, according to research by PriceGrabber.

Based on surveying 7,987 consumers in March 2011, PriceGrabber found that the average smartphone owner downloads 21 apps, three of which are shopping related.

The U.S. will have 20 million ereaders in consumer hands by the end of 2011, according to eMarketer. This is up from 12.7 million last year.

About 8.7 percent of U.S. adults will have a Kindle, NOOK, Sony Reader or other ereading device by the end of the year, growing to 12 percent by the end of next year.

U.S. teenagers spend most of their discretionary dollars on clothes. For clothes retailers, this begs the question: do teens use the Internet to buy clothes and, if so, how?

According to research from Piper Jaffray, in spring 2011, teenagers spent 20 percent of their budgets on clothes, 8 percent on shoes, and 11 percent on accessories and personal care items. And while the biggest influence on their buying decisions was friends (a.k.a. peer pressure), after that came the Internet, and then various other kinds of media such as television and film.