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Strong first-quarter e-commerce sales have analysts forecasting the biggest year-over-year e-tailing increase since the economy soured. Online sales jumped 25.9 percent from 2002 to 2003, according to Department of Commerce numbers released Friday. Sales went from $9.5 billion to $11.9 billion, confirming earlier predictions that e-commerce would finally begin recovery. In the last few quarters, sales have averaged a 13 percent growth. Although rates were 68 percent before the 2000 burst, they probably won’t rebound to those levels anytime soon. Instead, the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org forecast yearly growth of 26 percent over 2002, to about $96 billion. Shop.org also predicted that 4.5 percent of all retail sales would come from online sales, three times the amount from last year.
Kazaa program becomes most-downloaded ever
Will Sharman Networks earn a gold record for this one? Doubtful, but it is a distinction of sorts. The company claims that its file-sharing software, available via Kazaa, has become the most-downloaded program ever on the internet, surpassing instant messaging program ICQ. Sharman says that 230 million Kazaa downloads were made by Friday, according to CNET Networks’ Download.com. The Kazaa site averages 366,000 downloads per day, more than seven times what ICQ averages. Kazaa has proven a major pain to the record industry, which blames it and free peer-to-peer file trading sites like it for the sharp decrease in CD sales over the past few years. The music industry is actually in the midst of a court battle with Sharman, alleging copyright violations. Music isn’t the only thing traded via Kazaa download. The site also allows for swaps of movies, games and software.
Newspapers no longer snubbing e-only job ads
Newspapers are embracing online-only job advertising, only a few years after universally shunning it. New statistics from Corzen Inc. find that web-exclusive help-wanted ads are available for 49 percent of the country’s 245 biggest newspapers. That’s a big jump from the 32 percent found in fourth-quarter 2002, showing just how willing newspapers have become to abandon their long-held push for print-web synergy in the face of falling advertising. Recruitment ad revenues have dipped from $6 billion, in part because of the availability of online-only job ads on Monster, HotJobs and the like. Corzen also found that newspaper prices for 30-day online-only job ads are comparable to most of the online-only sites.
Study: Gamers value more online capabilities
No wonder Sony and Microsoft, makers of PlayStation and Xbox, respectively, have been so eager to get their gaming systems online. A new study from Lucid Marketing finds that 63 percent of avid gamers consider it “very or somewhat important” to play against each other online. Three-quarters always or sometimes register for e-mail updates from game publishers, while nearly 60 percent said that they expect to use the internet to download updates and add-ons to all of their games. More than 80 percent wanted e-mails touting advance game releases and cheat codes. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said that they played computer games while 77 percent used PlayStation2. Lucid says the average gamer is a male age 19 to 34 who has played for nine years or more for an average of 10 hours per week.
May 27, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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