The top 200 books each year consistently represent 10% of overall unit sales.
The top three categories in Adult Fiction (General Fiction, Romance and Mystery/Detective) account for almost 60% of fiction sales.
Ad Spending:
Advertising on Cable TV saw the largest growth with an increase of 8.1% over the first half of 2007.
Spot Radio fared the worst among the 19 media categories analyzed, declining 10.1% in the first half of 2008.
The top 10 companies (ranked by ad spending) spent $7.7 billion in the first half of 2008—down from $8.1 billion last year.
Online Activity:
Yearly E-commerce sales reached $204 billion in September 2008.
Blog proliferation continued to increase, reaching 92 million—up from 77 million in September 2007.
Time spent daily viewing videos online increased 46% from 0:04 minutes in September 2007 to 0:07 in September 2008.
Mobile Market:
The increasing mobile Internet penetration is being driven by a growing universe of smartphones (today about one in 10 mobile subscribers carries a smartphone), faster mobile data networks that are improving the mobile Web experience (expanding 3G networks transfer mobile data at 6 times the speeds of older, 2G mobile networks) and a rapidly expanding realm of mobile Internet content (social networks, search, news and video sites are all going mobile).
The typical mobile subscriber now sends and receives more text messages than phone calls (357 compared to 254), and the average number of text messages sent or received is up 107% year-over-year.
As of Q2 2008, 15 million U.S. mobile subscribers paid their carrier for access to mobile video content.
Consumers will spend less on products that don’t deliver a rational benefit...
Gaming Activity:
In September 2007, next-generation consoles accounted for 22.5% of all console usage minutes. By way of comparison, last-generation consoles accounted for 60.7%. Fast forward to September 2008 and next-generation consoles garnered 39.5% of the usage, with last-generation consoles falling to 43.3%.
Xbox 360 has the highest usage of next-generation consoles, with Wii gaining ground quickly over the past 12 measured months.
The original Xbox still holds a slight edge compared to PS3 usage (9.8% vs. 7.7% in August 2008), but without new games being released for it, usage will continue to decline.
Gamecube has seen a 40% drop in usage over the last 12 months.
Retailing Trends:
Across all categories reported by Nielsen, store brands represent 18% of total supermarket sales, 13% of drug store sales, and 15.6% of Walmart sales.
Smaller stores are big news. Tesco’s Fresh & Easy recently opened its 100th store while Walmart’s new Marketside stores opened in Phoenix. Other retailers with smaller stores, from drug chains to dollar stores, seem to drive both sales growth and store openings.
More and more retailers have DVD vending machines than ever before. Redbox now has more locations than Blockbuster. Look for Blockbuster to strike back with its own vending service in 2009.
CPG Trends:
Out of 125 supermarket categories reported by Nielsen, only 15 categories grew year-to-date unit sales vs. year ago in the grocery channel.
For the first 10 months of 2008, some of the top growth categories include flour (+27%), pasta (+21%), dried grains & vegetables (+20%) and eggs (+19%). Much of this growth was driven by higher prices.
Although the growth of organics is slowing, year-to-date sales are up 19% vs. year ago.
