CORRECTED: Web traffic growth slows on Black Friday
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(Corrects headline to show Web traffic growth, not Web sales, fell on Black Friday)
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Holiday shoppers gravitated toward the Internet in big numbers late last year, with online retailers reaping some US&#36;23 billion from U.S. consumers. That figure marks a 25 percent increase from the &#36;18.5 billion spent online during the same period in 2003.
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Researchers report Web shoppers are busier and happier than last year, as the holiday approaches and online sales finally slow.
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Researchers report Web shoppers are busier and happier than last year, as the holiday arrives and online sales finally slow.
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What looks good in broadband news for Dec. 9.
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Plus: TiVo posts small profit...Novell reverses year-earlier profit...Lenovo posts 2006-07 net surge.
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Investor's Business Daily - Market News' retail trade index bounced 3.7 points to a still-weak 41.5 in the Oct. 27 week. Readings below 50 signal more chains are reporting slowing conditions. Same-store year-on-year sales growth is very weak at 0.7%, with total sales growth at 4.1%. Income is also weak, with 43% of the sample reporting declines vs. 40% reporting gains. Retailers blamed housing woes.
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Google lost ground in the U.S. Internet advertising market for the first time in two years during 2007 due to&#160;slower growth in the fourth quarter, market researcher IDC said Monday.The Internet search giant saw advertising sales growth slow to 40 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter, down from 50 percent year-on-year in the third quarter, IDC said. That blip cut Google&#39;s advertising market share in the U.S. to 23.7 percent in the fourth quarter, down 0.5 percentage points from the third quarter.The decline comes despite continued strong growth in Internet advertising in the U.S., according to IDC.U.S. Internet advertising few 27 percent year-over-year in 2007 to $25.5 billion, while total U.S. Internet ad spending in the fourth quarter alone rose 28 percent compared to the same time in 2006, IDC said. Companies continue to shift ad spending to online media from traditional media, according to the market research company.Google&#39;s fourth quarter decline could spell opportunity for its rivals.A&#160;merger between Microsoft&#39;s Internet businesses and Yahoo&#160;would give the combined company a market share of 17 percent in the U.S. Internet advertising market based on fourth quarter data, IDC said in a statement. While the figure would leave Microsoft-Yahoo behind, &quot;it would give them a much better fighting chance than if they went it alone,&quot; IDC said.Google could not immediately be reached for comment on the IDC report.&#160;
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Plus: Matsushita profit up 22 percent...Amazon's profit up, margins squeezed...SAP cautious on 2008...Yahoo profit falls.
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Retailers will have to work hard to achieve sales growth this holiday season because of the slow economy and rising prices, but online shopping should keep clicking, a retail trade association will announce today.
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(InfoWorld) - eBay will once again advertise on Google's U.S. AdWords network, but its spending on it will be significantly lower. eBay will start turning on its U.S. AdWords ads on Friday, ending aÂ 10-day pulloutÂ that made headlines worldwide and was seen as a sign of the companies' deteriorating relationship. eBay has determined that it doesn't need to spend as much as it did before the ad blackout, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said Friday. "In general, our AdWords spending will be significantly lower than it was before," Durzy said, declining to be more specific. eBay reallocated its U.S. AdWords budget to other advertising channels and found that it isn't as dependent on AdWords as it thought before doing this test, Durzy said. By spending part of its AdWords budget elsewhere from now on, eBay will obtain better value in terms of traffic to its marketplace, he said, adding that the AdWords blackout was never intended to be permanent. eBay shocked the Internet industry when it pulled its ads off of the U.S. AdWords network early last week. eBay is the largest paid search advertiser in the U.S., and Google is the country's largest paid search ad network. In March, eBay ranked first in the U.S. among paid search advertisers with 802 million sponsored link exposures, or 4.1 percent of the total, according to comScore Networks. Its position is even stronger if one factors in eBay's comparison shopping engine, Shopping.com, which ranked third on that list with 357 million sponsored link exposures, or 1.8 percent of the total. Meanwhile, Google topped the list of search engine referrers, handling 57.3 percent of all paid search ad clickthroughs, comScore said. Yahoo took a distant second place with 26.1 percent of clickthroughs. At the time of the ad pullout, eBay characterized the move as a regular "experiment" similar in nature to tests it runs regularly to determine the best mix for its advertising spending. Yet, a source told IDG News Service that the move was an angry reaction to Google's plan to throw a party in Boston last week to attract eBay merchants who would be in town to attend the eBay Live annual seller conference. Apparently, eBay's top brass took exception to Google's party, whose purpose was protesting eBay's decision to forbid merchants in its marketplace from using Google's Checkout online transaction system. After eBay turned off the ads,Â Google cancelled the party, but eBay kept the ad blackout in place until today, when it will be lifted. Google and eBay have increasingly become competitors in areas like online payments, where Checkout and eBay's PayPal compete, and product listings.
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Weird internet behaviour. What's going on? SÃ»nnet Beskerming researchers observed an interesting deviation in global network traffic over the last 24 hours, particularly for South American, Asian, and Australian networks. Normally, global Internet traffic (as observed by the Internet Traffic Report) oscillates around nine per cent packet loss, with global response times of 138 ms, and the internally derived traffic index at around 79.â¦
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(corrects to show event is not a holiday party for children, correction from source)
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EBay was the online winner this "Black Friday," data published on Saturday showed, but overall Internet traffic growth was well below last year's even as bargain hunters tracked down sought-after toys and electronics on the Web before "Cyber Monday."
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E-tailers have laggards and penny-pinchers to thank for last week&#39;s brisk sales, which grew 25 percent over the comparable period last year, according to comScore.Procrastinators and deal-seekers helped create a &quot;flurry&quot; of online spending last week in the U.S., keeping retail e-sales strong, comScore said Sunday.Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 21 -- the first 51 days of the holiday season -- U.S. shoppers have spent $26.3 billion online, up 19 percent compared with the corresponding period last year.So far, the heaviest online shopping day this season was Dec. 10, the so-called &quot;Green Monday,&quot; a term coined by eBay for the second Monday in December, which the vendor has identified as particularly heavy e-sales day. U.S. shoppers spent $881 million that day, up 33 percent from the corresponding day in 2006.By contrast, Cyber Monday, the first workday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., ranks as this holiday season&#39;s ninth heaviest online shopping day, with $733 million in sales. Cyber Monday is considered the day when holiday online shopping kicks into high gear.Overall, comScore expects this year&#39;s holiday season to generate about $29.5 billion in online spending, which would represent a 20 percent increase from the same period in 2006.
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This week you'll learn about Web behaviour exhibited by many users and how to capitalize on that by devising keywords and phrases to boost targeted traffic (and sales). Topics covered are keyword research, related words, misspelled words and more. 0314
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The AP article: Google Says Growth Is Slowing Down, that the search leader says that the growth that the company has seen so far this year, might not be sustainable.