- Mark Levin Signs Multi-year Deal with ABC, Expands Show to 3 Hours
- Consumerist.com Adopted by Old-School Consumers Union, Stops Selling Ads
- For Auto Industry, 2009 Holds Even Tighter Ad Budgets
- User-Generated Magazine Publisher 8020 Media Shuts Doors
- Out-of-Home, Fueled by Digital, to Weather Recession Well
- Clear Channel Swaps Cincy Stations for Five in Green Bay
- Consumers Swarm to Discounters for Grocery Items, Don’t Switch Back
- Wikimedia Raises $6.2M to Keep Wikipedia Afloat
- Conde Nast’s Jan. Ad Pages Slip More than Most
- Aegis Faces Possible Sale or Spin-off of Non-core Businesses
- Top US Cities for Charitable Givers, by Category
- Online Fitness, Video Game Spending Outperforms Brick-And-Mortar
- RIM Must Fix Glitches, Boost Satisfaction To Hold Off iPhone
- LCD TV Revenue to Fall YoY for First Time Ever
- Top 10 Broadcast Media Websites - November 2008
- Top 10 Entertainment Online Advertisers by Image-Based Impressions - November 2008
- Top 10 Sports Websites - November 2008
- Eight in 10 Online Holiday Shoppers Read Web Reviews
- Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Merry Outlook for Some, but Not Others
- Firefox Share Tops 20% in November
Sears
Retailers’ Balance Sheets Tell All
As holiday season sales results come rolling in, analysts stipulate that the downturn in sales may push even more retailers into bankruptcy court. But sales trends are not the only measure of a retailer’s health, Barron’s writes.
To distinguish the companies with promise from those that are truly in danger of going under, it examined other factors on the corporate balance sheet, like ratios of...
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Wal-Mart Only Retail Winner in Bleak Christmas Shopping Season
Wal-Mart is the only real retail winner during the 2008 holiday shopping season, which is presaging more retail bankruptcies in the year ahead, according to C. Britt Beemer, CEO of America’s Research Group (ARG), who issued his 2008 “Winners and Losers” list of retailers.
The “Winners and Losers” (complete list below) are determined by how well they did in retaining Christmas customers from...
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Kmart Harnesses Power of Influential Bloggers
Kmart kick-started a social-networking campaign by giving six well-known bloggers $500 gift certificates to go on a shopping spree in a Kmart store—and then share their experience with their readers.
The bloggers could write anything at all, positive or negative, and all of them clearly disclosed the arrangement in their posts, writes MediaPost.
The purpose was to get people talking about Kmart...
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Consumers Spend Less for Xmas, Shop at Fewer Retailers; Wal-Mart an Exception
The number of consumers saying they will spend less for Christmas gifts is at an all time high this year, at 40.1%, nearly double last year’s (23.0%)—and approaching triple the proportion of those saying so in the previous three years, according to the America’s Research Group/UBS Christmas 2008 Survey.
Of those spending less, job fears motivate 63.6% this year, vs. 0% last year. The big...
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State of U.S. Same Store Sales - November 2008 Data Update
RetailerDaily has compiled comparable store sale data from the SEC filings of ten major U.S. retailers spanning 2007 and 2008 up to the most recently released November numbers. The data excludes fuel sales (which would have distorted numbers because of high gas inflation in 2008) and is available in Excel format from the link below:
Among the highlights this year, Wal-Mart shows more...
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Wal-Mart Stores Open All Day in Canada; 66% to Holiday-Shop There
Wal-Mart Canada is keeping 192 of its stores open 24 hours a day, through Christmas Eve, reports UPI. It already had 30 stores open all day long—25 of them since January.
The company cited a survey according to which four in ten Canadians said their choice of shopping destination in part depends on extended store hours. (More results from that survey, below.)
”[T]he popularity of 24-hour...
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Retail Sales Marred by Web-Performance Issues, Browser Wars
With the market and retailers nervous about sales and shoppers scouring the web for bargains, it’s no time for website outages or slowdowns—but many of the largest brands disappointed potential shoppers on Cyber Monday.
The websites of Dell, Victoria’s Secret and Williams-Sonoma, among others, had performance issues during the morning of Cyber Monday, causing them to lose sales opportunities and...
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Cyber Monday Drives 10% Increase in Web Traffic to Online Shopping Sites
As people headed back to work after the holiday weekend, Cyber Monday web traffic from home and work to the Nielsen Online Holiday eShopping Index increased 10% year over year.
Unique visitors to the sites included in the Index reached 35.9 million, a 13% increase over this year’s Black Friday Web traffic.
“The growth in traffic to online retail sites on Cyber Monday was better than many...
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Sears Posts Loss, Announces Store Closings, New Execs
Sears Holdings reported a wider-than-expected Q3 loss, having been hurt by fewer shoppers at its Kmart and Sears chains, MarketWatch writes.
Poor strategic decisions from chairman Edward Lampert to skimp on store investments and cut other costs may have further hurt the company, causing it to lose out to competitors such as Wal-Mart and JCPenney, analysts suggest.
Revenue in the quarter (ended...
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Black Friday Traffic to Online-Shopping Sites Up 10%
Web traffic from home and work to the Nielsen Online Holiday eShopping Index increased 10% year over year on Black Friday, growing from 28.8 million unique visitors in 2007 to 31.7 million unique visitors in 2008, Nielsen Online reported (pdf). The index tracks more than 120 representative online retailers.
Below, additional findings released by Nielsen Online.
Category Growth
Consumer...
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