Online advertising will be bigger than newspaper advertising in the U.S. by 2011, according to a new forecast. Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s (VSS) annual media research report says money going to online ads will grow by over 21 percent each year for the next four years, when it will reach $62 billion, while newspaper advertising will be worth $60 billion. Web advertising overtook newspapers in the UK in 2006, when spend surged 41 percent against print’s 0.2 percent to pass the £2 billion ($4 billion) mark, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.

VSS also found people’s annual media use had dipped half a percent to 3,530 hours in 2006; users who usually watch TV for at least 30 minutes at a time only watching user-gen online video for five to seven minutes. Meanwhile, in 2011, the average consumer will spend $8.95 to download TV shows, up from just 98 cents in 2006. But their dollar and time spending on newspapers and online newspapers drop by $2.16 and 24 hours to $46.44 and 154 hours by 2011. (Via FT.com and USA Today.)

Update: The VSS summary with more details is here.