Information Week reports on the growth in online sales this holiday season.

Online sales using Visa-branded cards for the week ended Dec. 26 reached $1.8 billion, up 58% over the same period last year, while the number of online transactions reached 24 million, up 43% from a year ago, according to Visa USA's SpendTrak report.

For the week ended Dec. 19, Visa's online sales were $2.7 billion (up 39%) and online transactions were 34 million (up 34%). Similar increases were recorded for preceding weeks.

Bank of America has released the results of a new study of consumer thinking regarding online banking.

Overall, when consumers were asked, "What prompted you to start banking online?" 64% cited 24-hour access to their accounts, 54% noted convenience and 48% answered that online banking saved time.

Blog Bucks: The wild and wooly blogosphere itself will not make money for many, including blog networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. Nevertheless, blogs are already proving to be powerful audience retention devices for known media brands. Some B2B sites report that up to 10% of daily traffic now goes to columnist blogs. Blogging is less a business model than a thoroughly compelling communications model that keeps users coming back two and three times a day more effectively than standard content refreshes. Accept it and get sponsors for it.

Digital Distribution: The tipping point is approaching, accelerated by the remarkable success of iTunes. Consumers and businesses are becoming more comfortable buying content without tangibles like discs or software boxes to make data feel real. Entire categories of popular software (PC security, casual games, etc.) have moved from brick and mortar to online, and much of the business research market already relies on emailing PDFs rather than mailing one-ton paper reports. Far-sighted vendors for consumer media like music and games are including tools that help customers make their own tangible backups. Ultimately, CD and DVD burners will be redefined as personal archive devices for material we buy and download to home media servers. The paradigm shift is occurring faster for consumers than for many content providers.

Vertical Search (or Google gets down to business): Enterprising content providers will start applying the search paradigm to drilling more efficiently and deeper into silos of vertical content. The model for this is GlobalSpec.com, an engineering information company that has build an impressive vertical portal. Engineers put in a search term and they get links to relevant Web information indexed for engineering terms as well as libraries of aggregated need-to-know data like regulatory information, patents, etc. By putting in a search term, engineers can call up a product diagram or vendor parts list that is directly relevant to the job on their desktop. Google cannot do this, but content experts managing the right search engine and partnerships with other providers can.

Real is in a good position to succeed with the streaming media syndication business because it controls the player and server software. But there's no reason that there can't be other syndicators, too. What about, for instance, a Publisher's Clearing House kind of site, where you'd pick from a paid list of content providers and pay the syndicator once, letting the syndicator deal with payments to the providers. On the back end of the deal, the content provider could cut deals with the syndicator for better positioning on the subscription page and so forth. Not all content providers would get the same cut from the syndicator.

This seems to me to be a particularly good business for an ISP. When you're paying your $30 to Earthlink, maybe you could pay an extra $5 or $10 for access a list of paid content sites. And Presto! You've built a cable TV business model.

Enterprise RSS- Online Paperboy meme catching on

  

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