• by February 14, 2002

Valentine's Day could look very different this year for greeting cards sites, given the recent move by some to impose a usage fee for consumers. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, unique visitors to American Greetings sites -- the leading provider of e-cards with sites like Americangreetings.com, Bluemountain.com and Egreetings.com -- declined 10 percent, from 25.5 million in November 2001 to 22.9 million in December 2001. This decline coincided with the company's move in December last year, an intensive period for online greetings, to charge customers $11.95 per year to access and send most of the network's cards.

Meanwhile, traffic to the number-two and -three players, Yahoo! Greetings and Hallmark.com, both of which continue to offer their services for free, grew significantly over the same period. Yahoo! Greetings increased 70 percent, from 5.4 million unique visitors in November 2001 to 9.1 million in December, while Hallmark.com increased 74 percent, from 4.7 million to 8.2 million.

Moreover, the average number of minutes that people spent on Yahoo! Greetings and Hallmark.com increased following American Greetings' fee installment. Yahoo! Greetings increased 24 percent, from 8.5 in November 2001 to 10.5 in December, and Hallmark.com increased 34 percent, from 8.1 to 10.8. Conversely, the average number of minutes spent on the American Greetings network decreased 24 percent, from 13.1 to 10.0 over the same period.

American Greetings' advertising in the fourth quarter of 2001 reflects its decision to start charging a yearly fee for its e-greetings services. Fifty-eight percent of American Greetings' total online ad impressions were directed at converting users to the pay service. Additionally, the network relied heavily on in-house advertising in December 2001; only 13 percent of the property's ads were on sites outside its corporate hierarchy. While total online advertising for the network spiked 530 percent between November and December to reach 287 million impressions, online advertising outside the American Greetings network was only 150 percent over the same period, when impressions reached 38 million.

Conversely, Hallmark.com didn't show any major swings in online advertising over the fourth quarter of 2001; nearly 100 percent of the sites' advertising was conducted outside of Hallmark.com. The site had 40 million ad impressions in October 2001, 53 million in November and 44 million in December.