One more indication of just how big mobile e-commerce is getting. The number of items purchased via eBay mobile applications tripled during the 2009 holiday season over the previous year, the online auction giant said. Consumers purchased 1.5 million items on their mobile handsets during the holidays, translating to a sale every two seconds–acquisitions include a 23-foot boat ($19,108), a Steinway piano ($10,000) and a Hermes bag ($3,888). In all, eBay mobile users generated more than $500 million in transactions during 2009–close to 6 million consumers have now downloaded eBay’s iPhone application, and shoppers across 165 countries are now making 750,000 unique visits a day to the site using mobile apps. Read more at www.fiercemobilecontent.com |
Search engines played a bigger role in online viewing than social media, as did TV ads and stories and reviews on both the Internet and TV. Internet reviews had about twice as much influence on online video viewing versus television viewing.
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Knowledge Networks also found that 56% of online streamers of full-length TV programs or movies are viewing “purposefully”—that is, heading to the computer with the intent to watch something specific. That’s somewhat higher than the proportion of TV watchers, at 44%. Just 22% of online amateur-content streamers are purposeful viewers.
Read more at www.emarketer.com |
Small businesses using search advertising have sharply increased their efforts in Q3 2009, according to data from WebVisible.
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Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. The average number of keywords purchased was also up.
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| Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget. |
Over the last eight months, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a range of smaller companies have released book-reading software for the iPhone and other mobile devices. One out of every five new applications introduced for the iPhone last month was a book, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Job search sites have been one of the few categories to experience a boom during the recession. With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting a 9.5% unemployment rate in June 2009, the category’s growth shows little sign of stopping.
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June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.
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| New research from Interpublic Group’s Initiative
concludes that the recession is having a far greater impact on
consumer spending habits than previous downturns, and that some
behavior patterns, as well as brand perceptions, will be
permanently changed. |
Internet usage was up among respondents in every country surveyed,
with the largest increase being for searches for coupons and
offers, up 58 percent overall versus a year ago. Big usage gains
were also recorded for online researching for general information
(up 49 percent), reading consumer content online (up 48 percent)
and buying products online (up 48 percent).
Read more at www.adweek.com |
Revenue generated in the U.S. and Canada by the videogame industry,
minus hardware sales, will grow at an average clip of 5.8 percent
annually over the next five years, according to a new
PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. |
Videogame advertising, which generated just $30 million in North
America in 2004, will grow to $886 million this year and to $1.4
billion in 2013, according to PWC. Read more at www.adweek.com |
Last week, Microsoft launched the new version of its search engine, Bing and initial interest has been high due to a major advertising campaign to drive awareness, extensive media coverage, and of course, curiosity. |
In the US, Bing ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the week ending June 6, 2009. |
| comScore has just released April 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, which shows that nearly 152 million U.S. Internet users watched 16.8 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 16 percent over March. |
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Items Purchased via eBay Mobile Tripled From Previous Year
