Articles of the Day
Holiday E-Commerce Sales Surpass $23B - Online holiday spending in 2006 increased 26% over last year to $23.11 billion for the nearly two-month period ending Dec. 26, according to data released Thursday by comScore Networks. A late surge of Internet shopping in the week before Christmas–a 38% jump over the year-earlier period–helped push the total to new levels.
Hitwise: Google Blog Search Overtakes Technorati - Google Blog Search garnered a bigger market share of visits than longtime market leader Technorati for the week ending Dec. 23, according to new data by research firm Hitwise. The upsurge appears to be the result of Google recently changing its home page to showcase the blog search function more prominently, according to Hitwise research analyst, LeeAnn Prescott.
New Technology Offer Better Ad Targeting for Small Business Owners - At this point, small-to-mid-sized businesses selling local products or services ought to advertise online. Why? SMB’s usually make less money and have lower ad budgets, which makes TV a waste. But search-engine marketing isn’t enough, which means small-business owners need to dig a little deeper to get their messages in front of targeted audiences.
Consumers Prefer to Steal Movies and Other Content - Surprise, surprise: a recent study from NPD Group, a research firm covering the music industry, claims that movie downloads using peer-to-peer software and servers is outpacing purchases made from legitimate download services, such as CinemaNow or Apple’s iTunes. The study, compiled from NPD’s VideoWatch tracking software, finds that just 2% of online households purchase movies from movie download services, whereas 8% utilize illegal P2P services.
Jupitermedia Buys JustTechJobs.com - Jupitermedia has for once bought outside of the online images industry that it has focused on for the last year or so: it has bought out JustTechJobs.com (JTJ), an online tech job site based in Boulder, Colorado. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. JTJ has created separate sites dedicated to specific sub-sectors within tech. Some history here: In 2000, Jupiter, then known as Internet.com, did not buy Dice.com, now one of the biggest tech jobs sites, but bought oher content sites part of the parent EarthWeb. Last year Dice.com was sold to General Atlantic and Quadrangle for $200 million.
PayPerPost Acquires Performancing.com - PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers.
DoubleClick Sells Abacus To Epsilon For $435MM - Marketing services company Alliance Data Systems Corp. has agreed to purchase Abacus, which manages databases for catalog companies, from DoubleClick for $435 million. Seven years ago, DoubleClick bought the company for $1.7 billion.
FCC Approves AT&T’s $85 Billion Acquisition of BellSouth; Includes Cingular - The Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T Inc.’s $85.8 billion takeover of BellSouth Corp. Friday, after the telecom giant offered a series of major concessions to consumer groups and regulators. The agency approved the deal, the largest ever in U.S. telecommunications history, by a unanimous 4-0 vote. The merger creates a behemoth that will have a market capitalization of over $220 billion — more than double that of nearest rival Verizon Communications Inc. — and will serve 67.5 million local phone customers in 22 states, as well as 11.5 million broadband users.
