comScore Networks today announced the results of the first complete review of consumer e-commerce for the year 2001, reporting that sales at domestic online retailers surged to $53 billion for the year.

With much fanfare, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today issued a set of ad measurement guidelines for the industry to adopt and follow. Hailed by some as a "landmark," the guidelines are based on independently conducted PricewaterhouseCoopers study and input from the Advertising Research Foundation, Media Rating Council, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Association of National Advertisers - quite a roster, wouldn't you say? The guidelines deal with issues that have long plagued the online ad industry: measuring ad impressions, clicks, page impressions, and visitors and verifying ad delivery. Truth be told, they fall a little short …

I know I said I wouldn't talk about the online holiday shopping season anymore unless something significant happened, and though you may disagree with me, I think the fact that online retailers can quickly learn from their mistakes is a fairly significant finding, so here it is.

It could have something to do with the laziness of the holidays or with the fact that DoubleClick was very secretive about this latest development, but I completely missed them shutting down their Intelligent Targeting Unit at the end of December. ITU was the part of DoubleClick that focused on selling profile targeted ads and provided Intelligent Targeting technology to its DART ad serving customers - all of that is now gone. What's left? DoubleClick will continue to sell impressions, but only in run-of-network or run-of-site buys, or targeted via cookie-based criteria. The significance of this move, …

A few months ago I reported that the Online Publishers Association (OPA) was getting ready to study the media consumption habits of U.S. consumers and this week, as promised, the results are in. The complete results are available at the OPA website, but here are some salient points: The study profiles consumers who had accessed the Internet from work in the past 30 days ("at-work users"), and contrasts them with Internet users who hadn't ("non-work users"), and findings suggest that compared to at-home users, at work users (about 52.8 million of them) are significantly more likely to …

I don’t often endorse products, and I almost never – jaded grouch that I’ve become – get very excited when someone enthusiastically shows me their new creation, but the stars must have been lined up just right this afternoon when I met with eMarketer. This NY-based research firm is well trusted and well known for taking confusing and conflicting research reports and making sense of them for the rest of us. Somewhere in the middle of talking about the market downturn and the plethora of numbers they still crunch everyday, they mentioned – very matter-of-factly – a database …

Today everyone seems to be talking about the announcement AOL made last night and by now every accountant, stock analyst and media guru has crawled out of the woodwork and weighed in on the effects of AOL Time Warner taking a charge of $40 to $60 billion in the first quarter to reflect the costs of its merger last year. Of course, AOL generates about a quarter of its revenue from advertising, which makes the news significant for this newsletter, but the consensus seems to be that the move will not mean much for the overall health of the …

For years we've struggled to define every aspect of online advertising - the impression, the page view, the click - almost to no avail. But the one concept we could always describe fairly clearly was clutter - too much stuff on a page. And that was simply bad news for ads. Not anymore. It looks like clutter just got complicated. Apparently, there are now two kinds of it - "defined" clutter and "perceived" clutter. Dynamic Logic recently presented yet another study of the relationship between web page clutter and online ad effectiveness, hoping to prove that increased …

I promise this will be the last time I talk about last year's online holiday shopping season (11/19/01 - 12/25/01). Until someone comes out with something truly significant to say, here is a synopsis from BizRate.com, which does a good job wrapping things up. Weather and gender turned out to be the forces behind eCommerce's record sales of $6.4 billion this holiday season, with women and residents of the colder U.S. states shopping online the most. BizRate.com says these active shoppers helped increase Q4 sales by 35% to $12.4 billion, which made Q4 the strongest quarter of the year …

It looks like people are getting more and more comfortable shopping online, even though there is still a healthy amount of skepticism among consumers when it comes to buying online and Jupiter Media Metrix is reporting that online-only retailers really struggled to respond to customer service emails quickly this holiday season. According to data from the Pew Internet Project, close to 29 million people bought gifts online during the holiday season in 2001 and the average spent online was $392 per person. That is an increase from the approximately 20 million people who bought gifts online last year and …