Depending on whom you ask, U.S. online shopping is either in unprecedented decline–or one of the only bright spots in American retail.

On Thursday, comScore (SCOR) reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped two percent to $29.6 billion versus last year. That represents the first time since comScore began tracking the figures that online spending has shrunk for two quarters in a row. (Online shopping was flat in the first quarter, and slipped one percent in the second quarter.) ComScore was slightly more upbeat about the potential of growth in the fourth quarter, if only because we’ll be comparing it to last year’s dismal fourth quarter.

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Pharmaceutical companies, fearful of running afoul of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s marketing guidelines, have virtually abandoned search ad marketing in the wake of the FDA’s online ad crackdown earlier this year.

According to a study from web metrics measurement firm ComScore (SCOR), paid search ads by pharmaceutical companies dropped a whopping 84% between March 26 of this year and the end of June.

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Someday, the e-tailing sector will grow again. But not yet.

In the second quarter, U.S. online retail sales fell one percent year over year, following flat sales in the first quarter and a three percent drop in the fourth quarter of last year, according to ComScore.

“The marginally negative growth in Q2, on the heels of flat growth in Q1, signals that online retail spending has yet to turn the corner after a disappointing end to last year,” ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement.

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In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war. Now that Yahoo has agreed to send its users’ questions to the Microsoft Bing search engine for answers, the companies’ combined share of the search market will be 7.7 percent in the UK and 28 percent in the US, according to comScore (SCOR).

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Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers–too much, it may turn out.

Two weeks ago, comScore’s report that Hulu had pulled into the top three streaming video sites was quickly followed by news that Disney (DIS)–the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN–was taking a stake in the venture.

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The number of consumers signing up to access the Internet via PC data cards has come nearly to a screeching halt, according to new data from comScore (SCOR).

The research firm reports today that the number of U.S. subscribers signing up for mobile broadband services using data cards grew just five percent sequentially in the fourth quarter, after a long string of double-digit gains. ComScore notes that PC data card adoption grew 163 percent overall in 2008, after 157 percent growth in 2007. But the five percent growth in Q4 was down from 22 percent sequential growth in Q3; in the 2007 Q4, there was 28 percent sequential growth.

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Earlier this week, comScore (SCOR) reported that daily web usage on mobile devices had doubled in the last 12 months, with nearly 22.4 million U.S. mobile users using their devices to go on the web.

Today, another research firm, Infonetics Research reported that despite the global economic downturn, the demand for mobile broadband is only going to increase. They expect that there will be more than 1 billion mobile broadband users by 2013 vs. 210.5 million at the end of 2008. These are connections that use 3G technologies such as W-CDMA, HSPA, CDMA 2000 and EVDO. The sales of mobile broadband PC cards (and embedded 3G modules) were around $4.1 billion in 2008 and show no signs of slowing down.

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If social-networking site Facebook ever finds a way to make money–and that’s a big “if,” I’d imagine–it could pose a threat to Google (GOOG), according to a 15-page note out today from RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler, chockablock with charts and graphs and tables.

Sandler has an “Outperform” rating on Google and a price target of $475, which would be 43 percent above the current price.

Sandler writes that he’s generally felt that Facebook is complementary to Google, but “that could change if Facebook’s rapid growth trajectory continues on its current path.” At the very least, writes Sandler, “we think Facebook as the “starting point” for more and more users on the Internet could create some multiple compression for Google over time, if the momentum continues.”

Currently, the two sites are driving traffic to one another, and here Sandler offers intriguing stats pulled from Comscore (SCOR) Web data.

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There are two places most of today’s laid-off executives are heading: to job-search sites to see what other opportunities are out there and to networking sites in hopes they can reconnect with–and milk leads from–former colleagues and business contacts. One site, LinkedIn, offers both of those things in one place.

So it should come as no surprise that the site’s traffic is up in the recession. It hit 36 million members last Monday and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, which would make it even with Yahoo HotJobs, the third-largest online job site.

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J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan theorized in a research note this afternoon that Amazon.com (AMZN) could eventually be a beneficiary of the demise of Circuit City (CC), which earlier today said it would close all of its remaining stores and liquidate.

In the short run, it’s not likely to help, as the inventory from the company’s 567 remaining stores is sold off in a giant going-out-of-business sale that could pressure pricing in the already soft consumer electronics sector. But Khan also estimates that the company did $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion in online sales in its most recent fiscal year; he notes that, according to ComScore (SCOR), CircuitCity.com was the 11th largest Internet retailer by unique users through November. The company will stop operating the site as of Jan. 18, it said today. Khan thinks Amazon could inherit as much as half of Circuit City’s online business.

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No retail category had a great Christmas, but e-commerce players have some reason to gloat over their brick-and-mortar counterparts: In certain key holiday categories, online sales outperformed offline retail sales, according to market research firm comScore (SCOR).

ComScore compared results from its research to data from MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, which is often used as an indicator of national retail sales. ComScore found that in categories such as apparel and consumer electronics, online sales fared better than offline. Online sales of apparel and related accessories grew four percent for the first 24 days of December versus the corresponding shopping days last year, for instance.

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You’ve got plenty of “roundups” and tallies of shopping to choose from at this point in the year, but the more you read them, the less appealing the headlines are. Last week came word from research firm comScore (SCOR), which tracks Web users’ activity, that sales from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21–in other words, through the last weekend before Christmas–had fallen one percent. Then came Wednesday’s report from comScore that for Nov. 1 through the day before Christmas eve, Dec. 23, sales fell three percent, and that when extended through Dec. 28, they fell four percent.

Now comes word from privately backed Mercent of Seattle, Wash., that online sales surged 80 percent on the 22nd and 23rd versus 2007, and then fell sharply after Christmas.

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Sales for online retailers during the holiday season appear to have declined slightly from 2007, a calamity in an industry accustomed to growth of 20 percent or more. And it looks as though one group was keeping a tighter grip on its wallets than others: the wealthy.

Most retailers won’t disclose holiday sales figures until January. In the meantime, we’re left to piece together clues from third parties that track sales and Web traffic. MasterCard’s SpendingPulse unit reported last week that e-commerce sales were down two percent compared with last year, a figure that is in line with the one percent drop Internet-monitoring company comScore detected.

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Sifting through data from Web site ranking firm comScore (SCOR) about November’s search engine results, released last night, Thomas Weisel analyst Christa Quarles concludes that “Google (GOOG) continues to gain audience market share from its competitors and dominates the rankings globally while both Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) continue on a downward trend.”

Quarles did not alter any estimates or her price target or rating on Google.

The comScore “qSearch” International report gives traffic ranking for Web search sites overseas. It shows Google’s share of search increased by 1.6 percentage points in November, to 62.4 percent; Yahoo’s share of worldwide searches declined a quarter of a percentage point, to 8.3 percent; Microsoft’s share rose five percentage points to 1.9 percent, and Baidu’s (BIDU) was 11.4 percent, down about one percentage point. Globally, meaning, when you add in the U.S., Google was 61.9 percent of searches, up 1.5 percentage points.

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Online analytics firm comScore (SCOR) today released numbers for holiday online shopping activity in the U.S., and it looks as though cold weather that kept people indoors and online in some places provided one bright little sliver of hope.

Online shopping in the first 51 days of the holiday season, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21, was $24.71 billion, reports comScore, down one percent from the prior year’s haul. Now, the weekend that just passed, Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, was down 17 percent from “the corresponding fourth weekend after Thanksgiving in 2007,” at $677 million. However, that’s a 98 percent increase from the $341 million booked during the Dec. 22 to 23 weekend of 2007, the “weekend nearest Christmas last year,” as comScore slices it.

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