NP: Incubus, A Crow Left Of The Murder

Kevin Drum and Barry Ritholtz don't care for Black Friday reporting. The NRF stuff is a survey, but it's also an annual survey, so the wording is consistent. I don't think it deserves quite so much scorn, but I agree that there are caveats. I actually have some issues with the comScore data Ritholtz mentions, but that's only because I'm hearing a lot of contradicting information at work, where we should be releasing some information on Black Friday and the first Cyber Monday as soon as I get out of Pittsburgh.

McClatchy actually does a good job of explaining the Cyber Monday phenomenon, which the Comedy Central guys clearly didn't read, because they mistakenly refer to it as "the biggest online shopping day of the season." It's not. It never has been. I'd say it never will be, but the concept has gained some traction, and the compressed holiday schedule this year might front-load a lot more sales. Still, I expect the biggest day of the season to be the 8th or 9th of this month, and I'm leaning towards the 9th.

And the first results on Cyber Monday are in, and overall e-commerce jumped 15% year-over-year. My expectation is still that paid search will outperform that number. Why do I like these comScore numbers and not the other ones? Mostly because the other ones don't really speak to the timing of Thanksgiving, while this analysis does.