• by November 15, 2004

The suspense is over. MarketWatch Inc., the successful publisher of the online financial news site CBS MarketWatch.com, has a new owner.

Dow Jones & Co., owner of The Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal Online, in addition to Barron's, Ottaway newspapers, the Dow Jones Newswires, and a bunch of other properties, scooped up MarketWatch for $519 million yesterday during an auction. That auction included Viacom Inc. and the New York Times Co. All in all, from the outside, it seemed like a quick deal from start to finish. From the inside, I'm sure it was anything but.

The move is a good one for Dow Jones from an online advertising perspective. With the overall upswing in online advertising and more traffic, Dow Jones is well positioned to get its fair share of the online ad pie. For the first half of the year, WSJ.com, the for-pay subscription site, racked up roughly 2.8 million unique visitors per month, while MarketWatch (a free property), had 7.6 million. Dow Jones is also likely to finesse large cross-property ad deals (offline and online), with advertisers.

MarketWatch is likely to remain a free site, but is bound to be tapped to heavily promote the online Journal. Whether any of the Dow Jones properties will carry MarketWatch editorial content remains to be seen. We are also curious to determine how the extremely cost-conscious and fiscally conservative Dow Jones goes about cutting any overlap between the companies; in other words, what kind of layoffs or staff reductions will result from the acquisition? Even if the company runs MarketWatch as a separate division, there is the potential for combined sales forces, cross-property and cross-media ad sales packages, and editorial cross-pollination.

On another note, aQuantive's Atlas DMT today released an online holiday shopping study, which reports that Mondays are the busiest online shopping day. The finding points to the fact that consumers shop in physical store locations during the weekend, then jump online on Mondays to comparison shop.

The Atlas study reports that Fridays, typically slow days for online shopping, are stronger than usual during the holidays.

Other findings:

• The most active online shopping day in 2003 was December 15, versus December 10, in 2002. Last December 15th posted a 140 percent increase in sales over an average holiday shopping day.

• Weekdays between noon and 3 p.m. EST, are the most active online shopping days during the holidays.

• Apart from December, November and January are strong months for retail advertisers, showing an approximate 20 percent increase in sales, compared to September, October, and February.

Atlas DMT anonymously analyzed holiday shopping behavior from November 23, 2003 to January 31, 2004 across 28 companies whose online campaigns are managed using the Atlas Digital Marketing Suite.