Saturday, December 16, 2000

Online Shopping Dominated by Brick and Mortars

Media Metrix, a pioneer and leader in Internet and Digital Media measurement worldwide, has released the fourth installment of its Holiday 2000 E-commerce Series, revealing the most comprehensive retail Web-site measurement results for the third week of the holiday-shopping season, ending Dec. 10, 2000. The Media Metrix Online Shopping Index, which aggregates Web visitors from both home and work to nearly 400 retail sites and 18 retail subcategories, grew 27.5 percent for week three of the 2000 holiday-shopping season versus the same week last year, climbing from 27.4 million unique visitors to 34.9 million. This increase outpaced the 20.6 percent increase in visitors to the entire Web over the same time period.

Highlights for Week Three of the 2000 Holiday Season:

While the top four retail sites for the week ending Dec. 10, 2000 – Amazon.com, Mypoints.com, Half.com and Bizrate.com – maintained their respective rankings since the prior week, Walmart.com moved up from number eight to number five, with 526,000 average daily unique visitors. The week-over-week traffic growth of 46.5 percent also placed Walmart.com among the top ten gaining retail sites for the week ending Dec. 10, 2000.

Ourhouse.com was the top-gaining retail site, with week-over-week traffic growth of 415.5 percent, increasing from 71,000 average daily unique visitors for the week ending Dec. 3, 2000 to 366,000 average daily unique visitors for the week ending Dec.10, 2000. This surge in visitors placed Ourhouse.com among the top ten retail sites overall for the week.

Eight of the top ten retail-site gainers for the week ending Dec. 10, 2000 were traditional offline brands: Eddiebauer.com, Radioshack.com, Walmart.com, Columbiahouse.com, Bluelight.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Intuit.com and Nordstrom.com.

Books reclaimed the top ranking among retail subcategories for week three of the holiday-shopping season, surpassing the computer category, which held the number-one spot the week prior with 2.4 million average daily unique visitors.

“As the countdown begins for the final days of this year’s holiday-shopping season, online shoppers are increasingly turning to familiar brands with offline origins,” said Anne Rickert, measurement analyst, Media Metrix. “Traditional retailers like Walmart, Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom are helping online consumers access a wider range of non-standardized merchandise such as apparel, housewares, furniture, health and beauty items.”

Women New Majority in Online Gaming
PC and console gaming is no longer just a man’s folly, according to a new report available through PC Data. The study reveals that while males make up 55 percent of overall gamers, females for the first time comprise a majority of online gamers.

The report indicates that 35 percent of home Internet users plan to purchase console or PC games during the current Holiday season. A majority of these (69 percent) plan to buy console games. An estimated 60 percent of U.S. households own a PC and one in three owns a game console.

The study, entitled Spotlight on Games: Categories and Hardware, utilizes a variety of data sourced from PC Data’s complete offering of retail sales tracking, Internet audience measurement, software usage tracking, hardware configuration and custom survey.

“The Christmas Holiday is huge for the online and offline gaming industry. Consumers have already spent over $3.4 billion at retail alone for games,” said Sean Wargo, Internet analyst for PC Data. “By year end, these figures could double making it a seven billion dollar industry. While the report shows that PCs are the platform of choice of gamers, console games will be the clear winners in terms of sales for the year and Holiday season.”

The results indicate that women comprise 50.4 percent of online gamers and that they typically favor online gambling, card games, and quiz and trivia games online.

Other key findings from the report follow:

Men and women prefer different types of online and offline games. Males prefer war and sports themes. Men are also three times as likely as female gamers to participate in first person shooter games (38 percent vs. 12 percent), real-time/turn-based strategy games (33 percent vs. 11 percent), and sports games (30 percent vs. 10 percent). In contrast, female gamers prefer board/card games (78 percent vs. 51 percent), gambling themes (36 percent vs. 26 percent), and quiz/puzzle/trivia contests (55 percent vs. 25 percent).

Solitaire, Free Cell and similar bundled games are the most frequently played of all online and offline games. The top PC game categories are strategy (real time/turn-based (68 percent), world building (67 percent) and flight simulation genres (68 percent). Console users prefer the fighting (72 percent), sports (60 percent) and driving simulation categories (54 percent).

Over 41.1 percent of gamers spend between one and five hours per week playing games. Twenty-four percent play games fewer than an hour per week and the remaining 35 percent play over five hours per week.

Christmas shoppers who plan to buy console games for their children or significants should watch what they rent. Nearly one-third of all gamers (30 percent) have rented a game during the past year. The vast majority of renters (70 percent) do so “to try out the game before buying.”

Of the 35 percent of respondents who plan to purchase a game during the Holiday season, one in three plans to buy an adventure game. Pokemon, Zelda and Final Fantasy were listed as top video games choices, and The Sims, Baldur’s Gate and SimCity were the top PC preferences.

Graphic quality was rated the primary criterion when purchasing a console game (59 percent). The list of available titles is also important to a large segment of buyers (39 percent). The ability to play against other players on the Internet was not a factor in choice of console.

A sample of 3,507 home Internet users, including both gamers and non-gamers, were selected from a panel of 120,000 U.S. home Internet users during Nov. 2 – 9 for the survey components of the report. Margin of error on this data is +/- 1.7 percent.

News Tidbits (appears every day on front page)
- eToys.com is falling fast. The online toy store announced that it will not meet third quarter expectations and only has enough money to last through March. Webmaster Techniques Magazine wrote an article last March that criticized eToys for changing its affiliate program to better favor the company. The result was several affiliates dropping eToys in favor of other online toy stores. eToys stock is expected to drop under $1 on Monday.

- The Register in the UK is making some strange claims. In an article titled "Net Users Are Lunatics," The Register states the following: "People use the Net and chat on the phone more in the run-up to a full moon than at any other time of the month, according to the boffins at BT." The claim is that when a full moon nears, creative and emotional energy are at their highest levels, leading to the increased activity on the net and on phone.