Some Impressive Online Growth Stats

There have been a number of reports released this past week that provide clear evidence online commerce is continuing to grow at a phenomenal pace.

According to this article in the Houston Chronicle, Shop.org’s 9th Annual 2006 State of Retailing Online report shows Web sales this year will top 200 billion. This figure has doubled in just three short years. And, a story yesterday at Internet Retailer, indicates online retail sales in the first quarter of 2006 increased 25 percent over the previous year’s same-period totals.

This growth is not surprising when you look at the results of BIGresearch’s April Consumer Intentions and Action Survey. To quote BIGresearch: “Consumers Are Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow.” Of the 8000 consumers polled, nearly 1/3 agreed with the statement:  “I live for today because tomorrow is uncertain.” This is a bit scary, but partially explains our country’s low savings rate.

A report in eMarketer indicated continued rapid broadband growth and estimated that 88 percent of U.S. households would have broadband access to the Web by 2010. Another eMarketer study indicates that of the over one billion people now on the Internet worldwide, 845 million use it regularly.

In the competitive search engine marketing arena, Google continues to increase its lead over its rivals Yahoo and MSN in the U.S. market. Google grabbed over 43 percent of all searches. Yahoo was second at 28 percent, and MSN fell to fewer than 13 percent.

Lastly, this has been a hot year for social networking sites and Nielsen/NetRating research proves it. The top 10 social networking sites grew 47 percent on average during the past year and now reach an unduplicated unique audience of 68.8 million. Combined, these ten sites now reach 45 percent of active Web users. MySpace registered the highest year-over-year growth of 367 percent!