Good morning! Today is the Monday after Thanksgiving. Nothing special, eh? True, it's the Monday after the longest holiday weekend of the year, but other than that, it's just like any other Monday, right?
Wrong. Unless you had your head stuffed inside a turkey all weekend, you know that today is called "Cyber Monday".
Of course, last year you had never heard of Cyber Monday and neither had anybody else. It seems that somebody, though, really, really wanted you to know that today is Cyber Monday.
A Google News search shows an absolutely astounding number of news stories written about Cyber Monday over the weekend (over 400 at this writing). A Technorati search shows over 6000 blogs posts about it.
After a little digging through some of the news stories, I believe I have found the source of the Cyber Monday meme.
An organization called the National Retail Federation put out a press release on November 21 called "Cyber Monday" Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year:
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. For the past few years, online retailers have found that sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving have been creeping higher, giving retailers an additional reason to be jolly during the ceremonial kickoff to the holiday season.
This organization put out this press release, and then the MainStream Media (MSM) ran with it. They've got to fill their newspapers with something over the holiday weekend and this was perfect.
I've never noticed that the Monday after Thanksgiving has sales any better than any other holiday season day, but it will be interesting to see if all this publicity about Cyber Monday draws people to buy online on today, which of course was the whole purpose of the press release. Online retailers wanted something like the media buzz that surrounds Black Friday. (Note: that Wikipedia link for Black Friday has a paragraph for Cyber Monday on it now - that wasn't there yesterday when I was first researching this! But wait, there's more: now there is a Wikipedia entry for Cyber Monday - that also wasn't there yesterday).
Since software isn't something people scope out in stores before buying it online, I don't expect "Cyber Monday" to have much of an impact for me or most other indie/shareware developers.
On the other hand, yesterday (Sunday) turned into the best day of November for sales of The Journal. I wonder if they knew they were buying too early?
-David
Posted by: David Michael | November 28, 2005 at 12:13 PM