As expected, online retail growth fell for the first time since 2001, when ComScore started tracking it. Growth fell 4% in so far in November. ComScore predicts flat growth for the holiday season, compared to last year.

“Despite the recent reprieve that plummeting gas prices have given American consumers, the depressed and volatile stock market, declining housing prices, inflation and the weak job market all represent dark clouds hanging over their heads this holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

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Symantec estimates that the potential value of advertised stolen goods online is more than $276 million, 59% of which was credit card information. The security software company ’s Report on the Underground Economy, the result of data gathered from underground IRCs and forums from July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2008, analyzed a segment of the online black market and extrapolated from its findings some surprising figures.

Stolen credit card numbers sell for as little as a dime or a quarter online, and the average credit limit on a stolen card is $4,000. Symantec believes that the total worth of all stolen credit numbers during the survey time was $5.3 billion.

Stolen bank account information sells for between $10 and $1,000; the average stolen bank account balance is $40,000, and Symantec believes the total in stolen bank accounts for the monitoring period was $1.7 billion.

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Ten years ago, there were only 57,200 broadband subscribers in the world. Today, here are now more than 400 million global broadband users, according to a new report (pdf) prepared by Power Topic for the Broadband Fourm.

This represents a 600,000 percent increase.

Broadband adoption was slow until a dramatic increase in subscriptions happened in 2003. (While Web 2.0 is largely seen as a social revolution, Kuhnian epistemological shift, and post-bubble techno-cultural Renaissance, we should remember that it was this fundamental technological shift, the switch to broadband, is what took us from 1.0 to Web 2.)

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The Newspaper Association of America reported last month that Newspaper Web Sites are an increasingly successful and popular means of user-level access to current events. These sites attracted over 68.3 million unique visitors on average (41.4 percent of all Internet users) in the third quarter of 2008, a 15.8 percent increase over the same period in 2007, according to Nielsen Online for the NAA.

In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated an average of just over 3.5 billion page views per month throughout the quarter, more than 25 percent over the same period a year ago (2.8 billion page views). These figures are the highest for any quarter since NAA began tracking the data in 2004.

Economy and presidential campaign news draw audiences to the sites of trusted newspapers, if they provide “comprehensive, up-to-the-minute reporting and analysis on the events that impact their lives,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

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Nielsen reports that 31 percent of home Internet users surf and watch TV simultaneously, and that people who use the Internet more often also watch more TV.

The top 20 percent of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes watching TV. People who do not use the internet watch 220 minutes of daily TV. Not surprisingly, those who watched the least TV also spent the least time on the Internet. According to the study, 31 percent of home Internet use occurs while the user is also watching TV.

Advertisers and TV executives have long feared that the Internet would eventually have deleterious effects on viewership.

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Americans are becoming increasingly addicted to their mobile devices, causing many to use them in dangerous situations, a new study says.

The number of employees using mobile devices is rising: 40% of workers will be using company-supplied mobile devices in 2010. “The prevalence of mobile device usage has created an unprecedented need for e-mail reliability because unexpected downtime has major business implications.”  This, in turn, causes e-mail addiction.

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Pew Internet and American Life released results of a poll asking adults if they thought that their family today was affected by the use of the Internet and cell phones, and whether these technologies made them closer compared to when they were growing up. While sixty percent reported not much difference, twenty-five percent said they were closer than family before. Only eleven percent said that they were not as close today as their family was then.

“Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.” Modern family life usually uses the Internet and cellular phones. A traditional family structure of a married couple and minor children are more likely to own a computer, use the Internet, and own cell phones, than other household types: single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children.

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A study of 8,500 Australians aged 18-64 reports that the Internet is one of men’s primary sources of happiness.  The Happiness Index study by business consultants The Leading Edge shows that women prefer many things over the Internet, but men, just a few.

For women, the Internet was at the bottom of the top-ten list, rest and relaxation number one. While entertainment was the number one activity preferred by men, using the Internet was third.  52 percent of male respondents were happiest on the Web, whether just surfing, playing online games, or social networking. Only 39 percent of female respondents answered similarly. And, yes, the study did make the Venus/Mars comparison.

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Online video content for PC viewing is the fastest growing category of consumer usage, according to a study released yesterday. Driving down usage percentage in peer-to-peer data and Web, e-mail and other data, PC online video is projected to comprise nearly one-third of Internet traffic by 2012. This is not to say that P2P and web usage will dip, but rather that the total traffic will increase, along with video percentage.

The video upsurge is not simply caused by more viewers and the increasing popularity of video Web sites such as Google’s YouTube and NBC and NBC Universal and News Corp’s Hulu. While the number of people watching is increasing, the quality of video is also improving. Simply put, this Internet usage shift is caused by both quantity and quality.

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Almost sixty percent of Americans interact with companies on social media sites; 25 percent do this frequently, (defined as more than once per week) according to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.

93 percent of those surveyed believed that companies should use social media, and 56 percent say they feel more connected with a company via social media.

Interestingly, while studies show that more women than men use social media sites, Cone’s survey indicates that men are twice as likely to interact with companies via social media more than one time per week. “The ease and efficiency of online conversation is likely a draw for men who historically do not seek out the same level of interaction with companies as women,” says Mike Hollywood, director of new media for Cone.

Other findings from the survey are: 43% believe that companies should use social media for problem solving; 41% for product feedback; 37% for brand activity; and 25% for marketing.

“The news here is that Americans are eager to deepen their brand relationships through social media. It isn’t an intrusion into their lives, but rather a welcome channel for discussion,” says Hollywood.