‘Cyber Monday’ a Myth
"Cyber Monday" is a myth created by a marketing company.
Cyber Monday is mostly a myth, CNN‘s John Sutter explains.
Five years ago, Shop.org published a press release: “While traditional retailers will be monitoring store traffic and sales on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), online retailers have set their sights on something different: Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.”
Ta-dah! The term “Cyber Monday” was born.
The only problem: It’s mostly a marketing gimmick, according to consumer electronics experts and an online metrics tracker.
Cyber Monday has never been the biggest day of the year for online retail sales, said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, a company that monitors internet traffic.
Typically, a Monday in December takes that title, and Lipsman predicted the biggest online retail day of 2010 will be on December 13. In 2009, Cyber Monday was the second-biggest e-commerce day of the year, but Lipsman said that was an outlier case, influenced by the recession. Usually, Cyber Monday is the seventh to ninth biggest day for e-commerce.
The next thing they’ll tell me, the day after Thanksgiving isn’t the biggest shopping day of the year for brick-and-mortar outlets. Oh, wait: It’s isn’t.
