Bob Hayes, Vice President and General Manager, AOL eCommerce, says "Thanks to these survey findings, everyone now knows that men are closet shoppers, so long as they don't have to get out of their comfortable chairs to do it. While women do represent the majority of online shoppers, men are outspending them. And, more than that, they are no longer just shopping online for the convenience, now they are also researching and browsing and comparing prices."

A new Harris Poll shows that U.S. adults who are online are using the Internet more often for new and different purposes. While email (66%), research for work or school (46%), checking news and weather (43%), getting information about hobbies or special interests (40%) top the list of online activities which are used "very often" or "often," large numbers of adults are using it for many other purposes.

Arbitron Inc. and comScore Media Metrix, released the first audience ratings from their new online radio ratings service - with an estimate of 4.1 million people a week, age 12 and older, listening to three major online radio networks. The Online Radio Ratings service rated the three charter subscribers - America Online's AOL® Radio Network; Yahoo!®'s LAUNCHcast,; and Microsoft's MSN Radio and WindowsMedia.com - during an average broadcast week in the month of October.

A deep drill-down into the Education and Career industries Online

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) published a research paper, "The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004," which concludes that in the U.S. and Canadian market, advertisers will spend $4.087 billion dollars this year on search marketing programs. That figure comprises payments to search engines and search- related media companies, search engine marketing agencies as well as in- house expenditures in support of such programs, including "paid placement," "paid inclusion," "organic search engine optimization" and "search engine marketing technology platforms"

The NRF 2004 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch for NRF polled more than 7300 consumers on the "hot toy" that they planned to purchase for children with a fill-in-the-blank question to ensure the highest accuracy. The survey found that most consumers buying gifts for girls will be on the lookout for Barbie merchandise (21.7%), though many parents will also be hunting for Bratz dolls (16.5%). Other popular toys for girls include video games, Leap Frog, Dora the Explorer, Care Bears, and Cabbage Patch Kids.

A deeper look at Online and retail apparel and jewelry sites, advertisers, ad sizes and types in November

The Radio Ad Effectiveness Lab (RAEL) has released its second study revealing the striking impact on various measurement criteria when Radio is added to the media mix. Specifically, the study charts what happens to several effectiveness measures when Radio is used to replace a balanced portion of the investment in television or newspapers. The results demonstrate that a media mix that includes Radio can be more powerful than television-only or newspaper-only campaigns.

According to a recent release by The Media Audit, though the younger age groups were the first to embrace the Internet, most of today's growth is being driven by the older age groups, starting at age 55. In the markets surveyed, representing a population of more than 130 million adults, 61.2 percent of all adults visit the Internet regularly. "That's up from 54.9 percent in 2000 and most of the new growth is coming from those over 55 years of age," says Bob Jordan, president of International Demographics, Inc.

According to Hitwise, in their third installment of the Hitwise Holiday Shopping Series 2004, online Americans in rural districts were 16 percent more likely than all other social segments to visit a shopping site during the four weeks ending Dec. 4, 2004. Bill Tancer, Vice President of Research, Hitwise, said "With the holiday shopping season well underway, Internet users in remote, rural segments are taking advantage of the convenience and comprehensiveness of online retailing. Interestingly, the data indicate that this higher propensity of rural Internet users extends across all socioeconomic segments, from the working class to the transplanted elite."