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 …

As we slowly get back into the swing of things after the holidays, let's take one last look at the online holiday shopping season. As Jupiter Media Metrix reported last Friday, during the last week before Christmas, the Jupiter Media Metrix Online Shopping Index, which aggregates Web visitors from both home and work to nearly 500 shopping sites and 19 subcategories, increased 57% versus the same week last year, climbing from 31.8 million to 49.9 million unique visitors. JMM's VP of Media Research Charles Buchwalter pointed out that in 1999 and 2000, the world was wondering if online …