According to Scarborough Research, in addition to being young and diverse, Texters are among the country's highest spenders on cellular services. On average, they spend $87 on their monthly cellular bill. By contrast, all cellular subscribers spend an average of $75 monthly. They are 46% more likely than all cellular subscribers to typically spend $150 or more on cellular service monthly. Texters are 12% more likely to plan to switch services. They utilize a wide variety of phone features - such as picture messaging, streaming video and email - at a rate higher than that of the average cell user.

According to the The Nielsen TV/Internet Convergence Panel, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all. Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well - the lowest consumers of television have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.

comScore, in an overnight report, said that for the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.

A new analysis by Hitwise, reviewing the 30 leading e-commerce brands in the Airlines, Appliances and Electronics, and Insurance categories revealed that in the four weeks ending September 27th, 2008 an average of 87% of searches for the top branded search terms sent visits to the brand owner's website. At the other end of the spectrum, a top 10 Appliances and Electronics retailer received 66% of visits from searches for its brand, a top 10 Insurance provider 78% and a top 10 Airline 75%.

IBM's second global online survey of consumer digital media and entertainment habits, conducted with 2,800 people in six countries, reports that adoption for most categories of digital content services doubled from last year, with services such as social networking now at 60 percent penetration and Internet data plans for mobile devices at over 40 percent for respondents globally.

According to Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, the majority of bloggers surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, says the report, yielding disparate estimates, but all studies agree that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

Evan Neufeld, comScore vice president of advertising solutions, says though "With online display ads yielding click-thru rates of less than 0.1 percent, advertisers can no longer rely on click-throughs to gauge online ad performance. Doing so fails to capture the impact of... view-throughs... on attitude and future behavior... essential metrics in assessing the complete (ROI) in online advertising."

While journalists across all age groups and beat assignments are rapidly adopting social media tools into their everyday work, the greatest usage is shown by young "Millennial Generation" journalists. Preliminary findings about these Millenial Generation journalists, shared by the Society for New Communications Research Symposium, showed that 100% of Millennial respondents (i.e., 18-29 year-olds) believe new media and communications tools are enhancing journalism, versus 40% in the 50-64 demographic.

The findings of the 2008 Incentive Travel IQ Report indicate that the poor U.S. economy, combined with the high cost of travel, is having a significant impact on how planners are conducting their incentive travel programs, showing that 47.6 percent of the survey's respondents are choosing to operate their programs on U.S. soil.

A study from the American Savings Education Council (ASEC) and AARP shows that 91% of young adults report having financial goals for themselves, only 53% report sticking to a monthly budget. And while 62% have given at least some thought to their own retirement, 61% feel their retirement savings is behind schedule. 42% of these young adults give themselves a grade of D or F to describe how well they are saving.