Deepfield, which offers services to build, manage and optimize network infrastructure, studied online shopping infrastructure by sampling internet backbone traffic across a “large cross section of North America and multiple collaborating infrastructure and internet providers.” The goal: To estimate how many users hit these sites daily and determine market share of the sites based on those numbers.

According to Deepfield’s results:

“What is truly impressive is how much larger Amazon shopping is compared to any other online site. Amazon is almost double the next largest shopping competitor, eBay, which enjoys 8.8% of daily Internet users.”

With Amazon, Deepfield includes a raft of smaller Amazon-owned sub-sites like MyHabit, although Zappos, which Amazon bought two years ago, was counted separately.

Deepfield included e-commerce hosting sites — including Shopify — to show how vibrant this market is. Shopify, which offers a web storefront that is used by more than 30,000 sites, garnered 5.4 percent market share among daily users. Quidsi, the company behind diapers.com, soap.com and other sites, also got a healthy 3.1 percent of daily visitors, and was also bought by Amazon in 2010.

Update: (12:45 p.m. PST) The results are summarized in the updated Deepfield chart below:

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Shlomi Fish

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Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December. 21 will be a big online traffic day next year?

Here, most courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other  big data and heavy traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order:

February 5: Super Sunday,  Super Bowl XLVI. This year, the big event will even be live streamed! Need I say more?

February 12: The 84th Annual Academy Awards. Eddie Murphy fans may stay away; the rest of the world will show up. Always a big event.

March 6: Super Tuesday. With seven primaries and two caucuses slated, Super Tuesday will be a big day, even if pundits are already calling it “less super than usual,” since many states have accelerated (and some have moved back) their primaries in hopes of maximizing clout.

April 29: The first anniversary of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Gird yourself for the memorial plates. The main event last April may not have broken the Internet, but it certainly did break records.

July 27: Opening day of the London Summer Olympics. Or “The Games of the XXX Olympiad” as they would doubtless prefer to be known. The games will run until August 12, so brace yourself for a brisk mid-summer.

August 27-30: The Republican National Convention. Doubtful this will come close to the 2008 Obama inauguration stats, but political junkies will be online in force. Last time around, the traffic to sites like the fivethirtyeight blog was off the charts.

Sept. 3 through 6: The Democratic National Convention. There won’t be a nominee fight, but the true political fanatics will still tune in. (See above.)

Nov. 6: Election Day. After all the build up, including the seemingly endless Republican debates, you’d think people would stay away. But they won’t.

November 23. Okay, so Black Friday this year was a shadow of its former self, ceding top shopping spot to Thanksgiving, but it’ll still be a day to reckon with. Old habits die hard.

November 26: Cyber Monday.  Also had an off year in 2011, but it could regroup in 2012.

December 21. For those out of the loop, Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end of the world per the Mayan calendar.

Wildcard dates: Then there are some events we know are coming but can’t narrow them down yet. As in:

• The Apple iPad 3 launch.
• The Apple iPhone 5 launch.

On the other hand, there isn’t a World Cup this year, so we’ll be spared that crush.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elmo H. Love

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The FBI and Homeland Security announced the latest seizures in exultant press releases lauding the eighth phase of the “Operation In Our Sites” campaign under which the federal government is seizing the names of websites that sell counterfeit merchandise. Today’s haul included discount-louisvuitton-handbag.com and googlenfljerseys.com.

There is another odd phenomenon that is coinciding with these seizures which typically take place near events like cyber-Monday or the Superbowl. Namely, some of the seized websites are no longer just displaying a US law enforcement badge but are instead redirecting users to YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) to watch a “public service announcement” about the effects of DVD piracy on the film industry.

This is strange for a couple of reasons. First, many of the sites have nothing to do with films but instead have names like massnike.com and mygolfwholesale.com — how exactly did federal agents come to favor the movie industry over the makers of footwear or golf apparel? (The films can be found on those two sites and others seized in last year’s raid; the films start playing after approximately 10 seconds).

Second, and more importantly, it is not clear if the federal government has the authority to use the seized property this way in the first place. To get a sense of what is taking place, it is helpful to know that the feds are relying on the civil forfeiture provisions of the U.S. Code. Those provisions in turn say that the procedure for seizing property are the same as those set out in a 1970 federal drug law. Significantly, the drug law sets out specific measures about what the U.S. government can do with the property it seizes.

Legal eagles can have fun reviewing the following provisions but the long and short of it is that it appears that the feds are supposed to sell or destroy the material they seize:

(h) Disposition of property
Following the seizure of property ordered forfeited under this section, the Attorney General shall direct the disposition of the property by sale or any other commercially feasible means

[...]

(i) Authority of the Attorney General
With respect to property ordered forfeited under this section, the Attorney General is authorized to

(1) grant petitions for mitigation or remission of forfeiture, restore forfeited property to victims of a violation of this subchapter, or take any other action to protect the rights of innocent persons which is in the interest of justice and which is not inconsistent with the provisions of this section;
(2) compromise claims arising under this section;
(3) award compensation to persons providing information resulting in a forfeiture under this section;
(4) direct the disposition by the United States, in accordance with the provisions of section 881 (e) of this title, of all property ordered forfeited under this section by public sale or any other commercially feasible means,

These provisions mean it is hard to figure out the legal basis for what Homeland Security is now doing with the seized websites. The law seems to demand that the federal government sell or dispose of the domain names — not commandeer them for a public relations campaign. What the agency is doing would be akin to the FBI seizing a cocaine baron’s Lamborghini and then keeping it for a drug awareness project.

The website seizures are already receiving scrutiny from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which has raised First Amendment concerns and compared the practice to wiping a place off the map. The public service announcements, which were first noted by Wired TechDirt, seem to raise even more concerns.

The fed’s cyber-Monday campaign also coincides with similar large scale seizures by private actors like Chanel which recently nuked another 200 websites through a civil lawsuit. Venkat Balasubramani, who reported the story on Eric Goldman’s blog, has noted that the legal authority for these seizures is also shaky and that, at this rate, brand owners may not even need controversial SOPA legislation to take down piracy sites.

[UPDATE: Thanks to Mike Masnick of TechDirt for sharing that the Homeland Security video is actually the property of NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) and was initially made for a New York City anti-piracy campaign. Ironically, the feds may not have paid to license the video. See Mike's excellent reporting here.]

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Will this year be the one when turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? We will have to wait a few more hours to find out. But the loss of Cyber Monday, which got its name when most people had to go into their offices to shop online, shows how far broadband, and now mobile, have come.

Wikipedia notes that Shop.org was the first to use the term Cyber Monday back in 2005, but the phenomenon of increased web traffic had been noted by retailers a year or two prior. In 2003, only 20 percent of U.S. homes had broadband connections, a figure that stands at 68 percent today. But in the past few years, as Cyber Monday traffic has bled back into Black Friday and even the two days of the weekend, the smartphone has changed the holiday landscape even more.

So while PayPal is reporting that it’s seeing six times the traffic on Monday than it did last year, it’s the Akamai data around traffic generated on Thanksgiving that catches my eye. Much like last year, it seems consumers aren’t waiting for any industry-mandated shopping day to submit their credit cards online. Thanksgiving itself experienced 70 percent growth traffic, according to Akamai, which saw a peak traffic of about 2 million page views per minute on Thanksgiving evening, the peak so far for this shopping season.

Is it mobile or marketing?

Akamai reports that on Black Friday, it counted 1.6 page views per minute during its peak at 12 a.m. EST, and overall, Black Friday traffic was up by 43 percent. But note that when Akamai saw the peak, it was still 9 p.m. on the West Coast, which means shoppers were hopping online on Thanksgiving Day itself. Perhaps this was because they were on the couch after their meals or maybe because the promotions were too good to pass up?

Akamai saw a peak of 1.6 million page views per minute as of about 2 p.m. EST and wrote on its blog that Cyber Monday would surpass Black Friday as the peak traffic shopping day so far this season and should do so sometime Monday night. Once again, the office isn’t the place to shop online anymore. Akamai is waiting to see if Cyber Monday will beat the Thanksgiving peak.

More people, fewer problems, faster sites

No matter when people hopped online, there were more of them and the sites ran faster. Web tracking by SmartBear on Black Friday shows that retailers’ sites were about 30 percent faster as of Nov. 25 than they were throughout all the previous holiday seasons. According to data from SmartBear, which provides metrics on site performance, sites that took 20.83 seconds to load during the holiday last year took only 14.67 seconds on Black Friday itself. Target, The Gap and Toys “R” Us experienced some issues but more so on Thanksgiving as opposed to the day after.

Akamai said last year’s global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at noon EST on Black Friday, which makes this year’s peak 20 percent higher. On Cyber Monday 2010, global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at 1 p.m. EST, while this year, we’re still waiting.

This is good news for retailers who feel the pinch of lost revenue when customers can’t shop online, but it’s also good for consumers who are impatient to buy their merchandise and get on with their lives — even for those who are increasingly using mobile devices to shop while possibly doing other things. As Ryan Kim says in his article on Monday morning:

JP Morgan noted a Shop.org survey over the weekend that found almost 15 percent of respondents will shop on a smartphone or tablet on Cyber Monday, compared to 6.9 percent who did so last year. IBM Coremetrics said sales on mobile devices for Black Friday increased to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year.

So more of us are online, using mobile device as well as our PCs, while the web keeps getting faster. Looks like holiday shopping mirrors the broadband experience as a whole.

For those who care how their favorite retailer fared the onslaught, below is SmartBear’s chart on how various online merchants performed on Friday. “RT” is response time.

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Historically, the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday has set the pace for the rest of the holiday shopping season. Last year, we processed more than half a million transactions on Cyber Monday for our retailers. From a same-store sales perspective, we’re already trending up 40 percent this year.

So, what have we seen from the holiday so far? First off, we’ve noticed the front-loading of the holiday season. Retailers have been gradually advancing their holiday promotions into early November. For the first time, we even saw a few “Black Friday in October” promotions. It appears to be working. Our retailers’ sales in November were up 28 percent over November 2010. As for the holiday season to date, we saw growth on all online channels, with most channels steadily increasing throughout the holiday weekend. In comparison, sales spiked on Thanksgiving and Black Friday last year and then dipped over the weekend only to spike again on Cyber Monday. This gradual climb (see chart below) suggests that Cyber Monday sales growth will continue on an accelerated pace.

Another trend we’re watching is growth across online channels. The channels we track include eBay, Amazon, comparison shopping engines (CSEs), paid search, and the total e-commerce sales across all these channels. As you can see in the chart above, Amazon completely ran away with sales Thursday through Sunday, only accelerating as the weekend went on. Here at ChannelAdvisor, we processed the highest amount of Amazon sales in company history on Saturday, even beating out Cyber Monday of 2010. We’re tracking the Amazon numbers today to see if we’ll set another record. As of noon ET, we are up 51 percent on Amazon.

Mobile commerce is another trend that has really made its mark this season, specifically with tablets. This is the first year we’ve tracked conversions on smartphones and tablets. With 10 percent of sales for our paid search customers, “couch commerce” was the big winner for Thanksgiving Day. Prior to Thanksgiving, 7 percent was the highest sales we’d seen in that area.

Purchases on tablets specifically accounted for nearly 8 percent of sales on Thanksgiving Day. On Black Friday, we saw a higher volume of sales through mobile devices than on Thanksgiving Day, which we’ve interpreted as an indication that more shoppers were using their smartphones to compare prices on the go and make mobile purchases.

The final trend we’re watching is overall macro growth of e-commerce this holiday season, especially with all the negative news headlines about the looming threat of the European debt crisis and increased unemployment rates. Despite this, we’ve predicted growth of 17 percent, with comScore and Forrester each forecasting 15 percent growth. As of the writing of this blog post, our customers’ e-commerce same-store sales started with 17 percent growth on Thanksgiving Day, followed by 20 percent growth on Black Friday, 21 percent growth on Saturday and 27 percent on Sunday — so we’re on the right track to hit that 17 percent mark.

Scot Wingo is the CEO of ChannelAdvisor, a software and services company that aims to help retailers reach customers through multiple marketplaces, paid search opportunities, and comparison shopping sites. More than 3,000 retailers use ChannelAdvisor’s software to manage e-commerce channels, such as paid search (Google, Yahoo!), comparison shopping engines (PriceGrabber, NexTag, TheFind.com, Shopping.com), and marketplaces (eBay, Amazon).

Image courtesy of Flickr user 401K.

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A couple of years ago, we commissioned a study for our subscription service, GigaOM Pro, on the greenhouses gas emissions of online holiday shopping versus in-store holiday shopping, and the trends still ring true. The study found in-store purchases represented an increase of more than 15 times the green house gases of online purchases. Overall, the impact of Black Friday in 2009 was about 50 times that of Cyber Monday in 2009.

It’s not so surprising when you think about the contrast. In-store shopping most of the time involves the shopper driving to the store, so they’re burning fuel, which emits CO2. And then there are the carbon emissions associated with the electricity and power for the retail outlet itself, as well as energy used for shipping the goods to the store (see graph of the breakdown below).

In 2011, Cyber Monday is supposed to be even bigger than in previous years and bigger than Black Friday. According to the Los Angeles Times, Cyber Monday in 2011 could hit sales of $1.2 billion up from $1 billion last year, with 122 million Americans shopping via Cyber Monday deals. In contrast, Black Friday hit sales of $816 million in 2011 according to comScore. People are more comfortable shopping online than ever before this year, and are turning to a more energy-efficient way of shopping: online.

With 7 billion people now on the planet, and 9 billion by 2050, it’s just not sustainable to have masses of people physically driving to stores and buying stuffing all at the same time. There’s a limited amount of space, fuel, and energy resources. Limited space is also why Black Friday has been marred in the past by things like stampedes and fighting.

And take the trend of dematerialization — or digital goods replacing physical ones — a step further and the Internet can help other sectors beyond shopping become more efficient, too. E-readers are replacing the production of physical books, and digital music downloads and movies are replacing the production and shipping of CDs and DVDs. Both of these digital dematerialization trends have been studied and suggest that they are reducing carbon emissions from the traditional businesses.

However, at the end of the day, buying less stuff is going to be better for the planet in general, so it would be interesting to look at if Cyber Monday increases the buying of stuff overall, and do people buy more stuff online for the holidays just because it’s easier? If anyone is doing research in this area, hit me up. Is there a point where the Internet becomes such an efficient medium that it produces more consumption, not less?

Image from Gamestop Amazon.

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Once a Destinations profile is created, Tubemogul does the heavy lifting of automatically transcoding a file to fit any technical specification needed for the target distribution outlet, and will send to that site automatically. Users can upload files in a number of ways to TubeMogul, including uploading files directly, designating a web URL, or through MRSS feeds. The product then ingests the files and transcodes them, automating the ability to distribute to thousands of niche video sites, custom FTP sites, CDNs and other endpoints.

Because TubeMogul Destinations is offered for free to users who host their own files, it could undercut a number of cloud encoding vendors, like HD Cloud and Encoding.com, that charge for similar services. TubeMogul marketing director David Burch says that the company can offer the transcoding and delivery for free because it has built out its own transcoding system and bandwidth costs aren’t that great. And while it is being offered gratis to users who host their own files, TubeMogul is planning a paid offering for those who want to host their files with the company as a way to recoup some of the costs.

While TubeMogul could see some adoption for its distribution product, the company is more focused on analytics and advertising. Its reporting suite is used by a number of media and entertainment companies, and the company has partnerships with companies like Brightcove and Blip.tv, which also offer its analytics to their customers. At the same time, TubeMogul has seen early success with its ad platform, which, just a few months after being launched, already exceeds the revenues of TubeMogul’s other businesses.

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On Cyber Monday this year, we’d been looking for any possible data on this subject, and after finding nothing, we got our research crew to crunch the numbers themselves. The GigaOM Pro and MindClick report seems to be the first comprehensive study solely focused on this subject. The data is significant, in that it gives both businesses and consumers more information about how retail habits can impact climate change and enable them to make decisions about their behavior.

From the consumer perspective, there’s yet another reason to avoid taking to the congested roads and malls during one of the busiest shopping days of the year. While online purchases accounted for about 23 percent of this year’s anticipated Thanksgiving weekend sales, that translates into less than 2 percent of the total related carbon emissions.

As shoppers turn to the web, their carbon impact will drop further. Fortunately, more post-holiday weekend shoppers turned to the web in 2009 than in previous years. Despite the weak economy, research firm comScore, which tracks online spending, predicted a slight 3 percent rise in holiday online spending in 2009, to $28.8 billion from $28 billion last year.

For retailers, the study suggests that a focus on in-store practices could have a substantial impact on their per-dollar carbon footprint. MindClick’s research shows that the difference in carbon emissions of brick-and-mortar shopping vs. e-commerce, in general, is a factor of 15. The largest share of that difference is linked to the local retail store’s presence; improving the performance of that infrastructure — through LEED for Retail and monitoring the supply chain, for example — could go a long way toward reducing a company’s impact.

The shift toward online commerce is part of the overall trend of IT leading to dematerialization, or virtual goods and services replacing physical goods. Dematerialization, which also includes video conferencing to reduce physical travel or buying digital music instead of CDs, could prevent 500 million tons of carbon emissions by 2020 (which is a little less than Australia’s total emissions in 2005), according to The Climate Group’s Smart2020 report. Infotech and communications technology can reduce carbon emissions across sectors by an anticipated 15 percent over business as usual by 2020.

One thing the research report didn’t take into consideration was the energy consumption of Internet use itself. In part, this decision was made due to time constraints, since we wanted the report out before the holiday shopping season was over. With further study, we would expect the carbon emissions associated with online shopping to be slightly higher.

Image courtesy of Akamai.

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Vizio reported record sales over the week of Black Friday, for instance, with more than 280,000 units sold — representing a 40 percent increase over the previous year. Vizio was hardly alone, however; as the Retrevo CE Demand Index shows, sales of TV sets during the weekend holiday dwarfed demand from last year’s holiday season.

Retrevo TV Demand Index

So what were consumers buying over the weekend? Based on preliminary data from Retrevo, for the most part they were purchasing small, cheap, store-brand LCD TVs (like me!).

Andrew Eisner, Retrevo’s director of community and content, says holiday purchases were marked by value shopping, with consumers choosing low-cost, store-brand HDTVs — like Best Buy’s Dynex or Insignia brands — ahead of similar  products from more expensive name-brand CE manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, or LG.

Not just that, but the value-hunting extended to consumers purchasing smaller HDTVs. While the sales for HDTVs larger than 37″ grew by about 170 percent over the past seven days, according to Retrevo vice president of marketing Manish Rathi, sales of smaller HDTVs grew by about 300 percent over the same period. Other data suggests a divide between sales in small HDTVs versus those that could fill an entire wall.  Despite reporting sales of more than 280,000 HDTVs over the weekend, for instance, Vizio “only” sold about 20,000 that were 50″ or bigger.

Based on the demand for smaller HDTVs, it shouldn’t be surprising that LCD TVs led the way over the weekend. According to Retrevo, 80 percent of shoppers looked at LCD TVs, compared to 17 percent that looked at plasma sets, and just 1.5 percent that scoped out rear-projection TVs.

Many of those shopping for a new TV would be replacing older sets that weren’t HD-compatible. According to Eisner, 48 percent of shoppers surveyed said that the HDTV sets they were looking to buy over the weekend would be their first. That shouldn’t be too surprising — according to a study from Leichtman Research Group (LRG) earlier this week, about 46 percent of U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, which means the other half of the country might be looking for cheap deals to catch up.

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