I lied. It’s impossible to unpack them, what with all the hype, razzle-dazzle stats, misinformation.
If you read much of the nonsense on the web, Black Friday was a big fail, Cyber Monday a big success – even though old-fashioned shopping brought in about six times the sales throughout the five-day period.
My three favorite stories/stats:
Social Media Drove Just 1% of Black Friday Online Sales
by Seth FiegermanIBM found that just about 1% of purchases and traffic on ecommerce websites for Black Friday and the week as a whole were directly generated by social media sites.
Cyber Monday won’t kill Black Friday for a long time
by Lydia DePillis
Online sales are also still a tiny percentage of overall volume -- only 6 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
Tablets Are Becoming More Important Than Smartphones For Online Shopping
by Emily Adler
…Tablet-focused advertising shows promise. The data shows that audiences are surprisingly receptive to interactive tablet ads…
This all sounds vaguely familiar…
The Social Media - WOMM - Web Advertising Posts (2005-Present)
04 November 2013
Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges
Clients and just about everybody else seem to be confused about advertising on all these new-fangled gadgets…
Bottom line:
Social media sites drove $148 Million in online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, a two percent share and flat compared to last year.
$148 Million. Out of multiple Billions.
The silliest piece I read won’t be linked to because I’m too nice a guy. It was written by someone who did a Boolean search of the term “Black Friday” and discovered:
…The term “Black Friday” mirrors what actually happened: Cyber Monday stole the show. I measured through the end of Cyber Monday, and this is the word cloud:
So tons of people on the web were searching for and babbling about what’s on the web. Wow. That means a lot.
More reading:
Delighting In Digital Dumbness
If you have a healthy sense of the absurd, there is great joy to be found in the dumbness of some digital mediacrats.
