Stories about: eMarketer

Brazil, Russia, India and China -- collectively known as BRIC -- represent 43 per cent of the world's population and will profoundly change the way both the mobile telecommunications and the marketing industries operate.

For the first time, Australians in 2007 were spending more time online than they were spending watching TV (an average of 13.7 hours per week compared with 13.3 hours of TV) according to Nielsen Online's 2007 Australian Internet and Technology Report.

Online participatory media is rocking. Visitors to Nike's site can create their own athletic shoes and have them custom made. Video sites Revver and YouTube pay amateurs for clips and our rankings decide what is entertaining. From Florida Today to CBS mobile, online news sites beg readers for comments, photos and videos, while sites as varied as Topix, News Trust and Real Girls Media encourage non-journalists to contribute or edit stories about local and world events.

There were about 6.6 billion people in the world in 2007 and of that number, 1.15 billion, or 17.5 per cent, were regular Internet users, according to some estimates.

Drastic marketing budget increases are not likely this year for most marketers worldwide, according to a survey conducted by the CMO Council and sponsored by Deloitte Consulting, Market and TechTarget.

With recent research reports showing that traffic to YouTube and other online video sites doubled last year, the race is on among companies looking to advertise their wares to that wide audience.

B2C e-commerce sales for the five major markets in the Asia/Pacific region totalled only $US59.1 billion, and Japan accounted for a tiger's share of the sales in 2006. But things are changing. eMarketer forecasts that B2C e-commerce sales in the region will grow 23.3 per cent a year to $US168.7 billion in 2011.

New e-commerce trends have shaped this holiday season, including the increasing importance of social networks, blogs and user content, booming sales of luxury items, an extended shopping period and the emergence of niche sellers.

Google has laid speculation to rest -- it is buying YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock transaction.

E-business is booming, and online marketing is back. US online retail sales are expected to reach US$65 billion this year and will continue to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 17% through 2008 to top US$117 billion, according to a report issued by Jupiter Research. Meanwhile, after taking a beating for much of 2001 and 2002, online advertising made an amazing comeback in 2003, fueled in part by the popularity of search, which accounted for almost 31% of all online activity in the first half of 2003, according to a joint report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Piper Jaffray & Co. is predicting 20% compound growth for the next five years in online spending and calling for 21% growth in 2004, rising from US$6.7 billion to US$8.1 billion.

They say money can't buy you love, but it can at least help you find a date on the Internet, judging by the amount that lonely hearts in the U.S. spent seeking soul mates online in 2003.