You will not be shocked to learn that online holiday spending is not off to a good start.
ComScore today reports that for the first 23 days of November, e-commerce spending–excluding travel, auctions and large corporate purchases–was down four percent from the same period last year. 2007 saw a 19 percent rise in spending–all predictions point to this year being flat. It’s going to be a long winter.
Heath Terry, the new Internet analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey, has launched coverage of the sector this morning, setting Outperform ratings on Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY) and ComScore (SCOR), while starting Bankrate (RATE) with a Market Perform rating, and setting Yahoo’s (YHOO) rating at Underperform.
Earlier this week, comScore released results of a study conducted with Leo Burnett advertising agency to see how male Internet users behave online. In the effort to “track the virtual man,” the study was to find out what men really do online.
It’s shaping up to be the hottest race on the Web. Much as they do on TV, Disney and Viacom’s Nickelodeon are duking it out online. And if the most recent numbers from Web-traffic researcher comScore are any indication, Disney is pulling into the lead.
U.S. retail e-commerce growth slowed in both May and June from levels a year ago, comScore said today.
The research firm said U.S. retail e-commerce (ex auctions, autos and large corporate purchases) grew 12 percent in May and 11 percent in June. That compared with 15 percent in April and 25 percent in June 2007.
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads.
In my article in Monday’s Times, “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on What You Click,” I worked with comScore to develop a new measure for Web companies: how much data they can collect from users.
On the Internet, companies are typically ranked by how many different people visit their sites in a given month. And when Microsoft announced its $41 billion bid for Yahoo, comScore and Nielsen Online promptly put out estimates counting how many people would be in the merged company’s total audience.
As the world recovers from the comScore report that floored Google’s stock two days ago, a theory is gaining steam that the whole click problem can be attributed to Google’s “accidental click reduction” program. Google may not be as badly off as the comScore report suggests, but the accidental-click theory is flat-out wrong.
Wall Street went bonkers Tuesday over a comScore report indicating that Google paid-ad clicks growth had literally collapsed. Is that good or bad for Microsoft’s Yahoo acquisition? The answer is complicated, in part because there remains uncertainty about the decline’s cause. If the problem is contained to Google, Microsoft could greatly benefit depending on execution. But if U.S. economic uncertainty is the cause, Microsoft could be buying Yahoo at both a good and bad time.
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