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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.

ForeSee: Amazon, Netflix Tops In Consumer Satisfaction – Online movie rental company Netflix and retailer Amazon had the highest levels of online consumer satisfaction this holiday season, according to a report slated for release today by research firm ForeSee Results. For the report, ForeSee measured consumer satisfaction indexes for the 40 highest-selling U.S. retailers on a 100-point scale. 

How Starwood is building the hotel of the future in Second Life – Starwood, creators of the upscale W Hotels brand, is using the virtual community Second Life to introduce its new brand, Aloft. The new hotel brand targets a hip thirtysomething crowd, offering wireless Internet service, chic areas for lounging and socializing, cool terminology (the pool is named “Splash” and the snack bar “Re:Fuel”), and loft-like architecture throughout. The chain wanted to get feedback and create buzz among its target audience before constructing a brick-and-mortar building. So Starwood began construction this fall on an “island” it purchased in Second Life, foreshadowing what it plans to do in 2008 in five North American locations.  

Yahoo 2007: Is Panama Enough? – Panama may not be enough to clean up Yahoo’s mess. In the face of a slumping year on the stock market, deserting executives and a trouncing by Google in Web search and mergers and acquisitions, Yahoo needs a good 2007. The company has placed high hopes on Panama, its new ad monetization technology aimed at delivering better-targeted ads to its users in the hope that it will make Yahoo’s search and display ads more lucrative. 

Possibility Of A Yahoo-AOL Merger in 2007; Google-AOL Change of Control Clause – So bets Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, in a note titled “Is 2007 the year AOL and Yahoo are in play?” last week. She said that AOL and Yahoo could be open to a tie-up in 2007, spurred by AOL’s falling market share in Internet search and Yahoo’s lag behind Google. “We believe there are several trends that could push either AOL or Yahoo towards a major transaction, with each other or with another competitor…Although not without its problems, we believe that an AOL-Yahoo combination is one of the more logical combinations in this arena.”

WSJ looks at Microsoft’s ‘behavior targeting’ advertising efforts – The company is making a global push to sell ads geared towards the interests and demographics of individual users of its Hotmail service, msn.com site and other sites. The push is based around the information provided when a user signs up for Hotmail and then the searches they perform, and the results they click on, when using MSFT’s Live Search. The company hopes to grab a bigger piece of the online advertising market by using the information from the 263M worldwide users of Hotmail. The system was launched in the U.S. in September and MSFT plans to roll it out worldwide. The company says it has about 100 advertisers signed up so far.

Monster.com Replaces CareerBuilder At St. Pete Times – Continuing its drive to align with traditional newspapers, career site Monster will replace CareerBuilder as the online recruitment service for the St. Petersburg Times next month. Monster and the 300,000 daily-circulation Times will launch a co-branded job site that will include career-related advice, a resume builder and salary information in addition to national and local job listings. 

Jewelry, Video Games Propel Online Retail Past $21B – E-commerce spending surged in the week before Christmas, according to comScore Networks. For the three days from Dec. 18 through Dec. 20, non-travel retail spending online climbed to $1.55 billion, marking a 35% increase from last year. Story: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=53003&Nid=26095&p=387769 Report: Wikipedia Founder Readies New Search Engine – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales plans to launch a new search engine, according to a recent report in the Times of London. The newspaper reported that the project, dubbed Wikiasari, could launch as early as the first quarter of 2007. 

YouTube Adds Features – Video-sharing site YouTube is now offering users the ability to instantly record videos by using Flash software and Web cams, as part of a site upgrade. The site also is offering a new user interface that cuts the number of tabs at the top of the screen down to four–videos, categories, channels and community. 

comScore: Google Passes Yahoo in Global Traffic – Google has displaced Yahoo as the world’s second most-visited Web site–although not by much–according to November figures comScore Networks. Google’s sites brought in 475.7 million visitors, compared to Yahoo’s 475.3 million. Both trail global leader Microsoft, which attracted a whopping 501.7 million visitors.

Web Ad Prices Keep Rising – The cost of buying ads on the Internet is going up, and it’s going to continue. The Web has proven to be the cheapest, most effective means of reaching a targeted audience. As such, more advertisers are shifting dollars to the Web, which places the supply of quality Web sites and ad networks at more of a premium.

Publicis Buys Digitas, Moves To Become Dominant Digital Player – In a bold move that reconfigures the digital hierarchy of Madison Avenue, Paris-based agency holding company Publicis Wednesday announced a deal to acquire online and direct marketing powerhouse Digitas for $1.3 billion in cash. Publicis, which already had a highly regarded and strategically oriented digital team, now gains the kind of clout and talent that will force other big agencies to play catch-up–potentially triggering a rush to gobble up the few remaining independent digital agencies.

comScore: Online Retail Climbs To $20.65B – Online retail spending from Nov. 1 through Dec. 18 reached $20.65 billion–up 25% from last year, according to new data by comScore Networks. The biggest day so far was Wednesday, Dec. 13, when consumers spent $667 million on e-commerce, followed by Monday, Dec. 11 ($661 million) and Monday, Dec. 4 ($647.5 million). Last year, the biggest day was Monday, Dec. 12 ($556 million).

Yahoo Scores Most Page Views Of Year – With approximately 354.5 billion page views through Nov. 30, Yahoo was the most trafficked Web property of the year, according to new data released Wednesday by Nielsen//NetRatings. MySpace garnered the second highest number of page views (250.7 billion), while Google placed third (147.7 billion)

Web 2007 Spending Should Surpass Conservative Forecasts – Advertising forecasts for 2007 are mixed, but just about the only constant is that Internet advertising will continue to grow apace, outperforming other media and likely, surpassing expectations. In 2006, Web spending was forecast at 20%; with three quarters now behind us, that number is closer to 50%, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Even so, most research firms think Web advertising will grow somewhere between 15% and 20% next year. However, history tells us that number is most likely conservative.

Google Checkout Is No PayPal Killer – The bloggers from Business 2.0 slam yesterday’s New York Times report touting Google Checkout as a PayPal killer. “How unsurprising: Bribe people heavily, and they’ll use your service,” the post says. That piece of logic hardly guarantees that Checkout, which is not used nearly as widely as eBay’s PayPal, will be a runaway success. In fact, Google may not pose any threat at all to PayPal.

Hitwise: Google Captures 63% Of Searches – Google has increased its commanding share of the online search market–garnering 62.79% of searches for the four-week period ending Dec. 16, according to online ratings firm Hitwise. That reflects a one-percentage-point gain from the four-week period ending Nov. 25. Yahoo’s search engine share, meanwhile, dipped slightly to 21.9% in December from 22.43% the prior month. Rounding out the top search engines were MSN (9.28%), Ask.com (4.07%), and AOL (0.59%). All other search properties had a combined share of 1.19%, according to Hitwise. The figures are based on the executed searches of 10 million Internet users across the top 55 search engines.

Loads Of Ways To Improve Google – Google gets lavish praise in the press. But guess what? Google Image Search sucks. It doesn’t have a comprehensive video search, and its Web search engine still delivers too many false pages that are (conveniently) filled with nothing but Google AdSense links. Some pundits believe the search movement is going vertical. Specialized search is an area that needs improvement, namely, better local, health, gaming, video, audio and music search. And Google isn’t there yet. The lure in creating search technology is advertising. Google has proven the model, but there are still many new areas to mine.

comScore: College Crowd Propels MySpace Past Yahoo – College students held the key to MySpace’s Internet ratings triumph over Yahoo for the first time last month, according to comScore Media Metrix. That prized demographic accounted for 12% of the page views on Fox Interactive Media sites (including MySpace), while only 6% of Yahoo’s page views come from the college crowd, according to new research released Monday by comScore.  

Polar Rose Aims To Improve Image Search – Startup Polar Rose hopes to become to image search what Google and Yahoo are to text search. Polar Rose, a tech firm based in Sweden, Tuesday unveiled a new image search tool that it plans officially to launch early next year. The company said that its image search technology is different from others since it relies on 3D mapping techniques to recognize facial patterns.  

Online Job Ad Revenues Surpass Print – Employers spent more on online recruitment advertising than newspaper job ads–$5.9 billion to $5.4 billion–for the first time in 2006, according to a new study released Tuesday. The online shift will continue over the next five years as Internet job listings hit $10 billion in 2011–or 13.7% of overall recruitment dollars compared to 6.5% for newspaper ads, according to market research firm Borrell Associates Inc. 

Study: Most Watch Web Video, But Avoid The Ads – Most Web users, 56%, recall ads embedded in video content, according to a study released Tuesday by Burst Media. But that doesn’t mean users like the ads; more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78%) said such ads were intrusive.

Nielsen//NetRatings: Google Searches Up 31% – Web users conducted approximately 3.1 billion searches on Google last month–marking a 31% increase from last year, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings. Google’s total market share of searches now stands at 49.5%, according to the media measurement company.

Blinkx To Carry Dow Jones Video – Dow Jones is expected today to announce a partnership with video search engine blinkx to make all of its video content–business and financial news from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s–available and fully searchable for free on www.blinkx.com. Blinkx is able to retrieve video and audio search results using voice and picture-recognition technology in addition to tags.

eBay Failing To Move Beyond Auctions – It’s the same ho-hum story for the folks at eBay. The online auctioneer is struggling to move beyond its core business. Its eBay Express Web site has been “a tough sell,” says newspaper. One eBay clothier reports being excited about the new site, which lists products for sale at fixed-prices, but last month, she didn’t sell a single item on eBay Express. It “doesn’t seem to be any help,” she said. She’s not alone, either.