CyberMonday Signals

As CyberMonday clicked through the retail space today, more than 68 million workers went online when the boss wasn’t looking and dropped an estimated $846 million into the virtual cash registers, 15% up from last year.

That's a lot of money. It means the internet is healthy, maybe healthier than a lot of brick and mortar. But what’s it mean for internet marketers who don’t sell consumer goodies? Those who focus on the systems and strategies web sites use to market and sell the goodies?

Obviously, more data is needed. Like, how the CyberMonday (and later) shoppers decide where to go for goodies?

According to eMarketer, 2008 online ad spending in the US will be up 11% this year to over $23 billion, with search advertising up almost 15%. That means, even in a recession, sellers believe buyers are going online, so that’s where their bucks are going. Again, good for the internet.

However, buyers aren’t as interested as before in the sites that work best for advertisers. YouTube, according to The Economist, shows 5 billion videos a month but has “trivial” ad revenues. And people – buyers -- increasingly patronize social-networking sites, although – egad -- to socialize, not to shop. So, while 11% of online time two years ago was spent at web portals Yahoo! and MSN, their share is now down to 5%, and 5% of browsing time is devoted to YouTube and Facebook.

A Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, says this creates an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers.

So it seems the answer would be to be more clever sooner. Get to and help create the new places for buyers to go online. Then, you can help the clever marketing managers spend some of their money.

Of course, this requires understanding why buyers want to go where they do, how they learn about it, and how to reach them. Best capsule explanation by someone who knows what he’s talking about is Claude Hopkins’ work at at http://www.targetinternetmarketing.com.