This holiday shopping season is beginning to look a bit more Christmassy, with shopping numbers for November and December finally matching up with the dollars spent online last year, according to comScore. With 17 more days left until Christmas, consumers will only be spending more money online, and continuing to outpace last year's online spend. But while spending is up online, the outlook is not entirely rosy.
The average online purchase this quarter is down 12 percent from last year, according to The New York Times:
While shoppers are continuing to move online this year, they are also consuming less and making retailers work a lot harder for their business, a problem that will permeate more than just retail as the shift online continues.
Advertisers and publishers have not yet learned how to translate traditional media dollars into online revenue, which gets increasingly problematic as ad spend in traditional media outlets decreases.
Online ad spend grew 11 percent to $5.9 billion in the third quarter, but that's still only a small percentage of total ad spend, which ZenithOptimedia, the media arm of Publicis, estimates at $172.5 billion in 2008. And even as online spend is growing (albeit slightly with the stalled economy), it is not replacing the dollars lost from traditional advertising.
Zenith is now forecasting that ad spend in the U.S. will shrink by 3.8 percent this year, a loss greater than the total dollars being spent online. While online ad dollars may stand to grow despite the stalled economy, the inability for publishers and advertisers to function at similar rates in the online space means that we likely stand to slice up ever shrinking slices of the online pie going forward.
Photo:* Flickr/Big C Harvey*
