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Cyber Monday Doesn't Exist
xsspd2004 writes "Despite a huge amount of hype, the Monday after Thanksgiving is historically only the 12th-biggest online shopping day of the year. Do a Google search on "Cyber Monday," and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago."
looking at google now, it's up to 1.8m
look at the results though, they are from cnn, yahoo, cnet etc etc
all big sites, and as you can probably guess, google crawls these sites a few times every day
so google crawling and indexing 1.8m pages in a week isn't impossible at all
Well, we have the primary news sites, then we have the secondary news sites, then we have news blogs (like this one), then every fricking blog and message board, then all the spam-blogs...I googled it just a second ago and got 2,060,000 hits. So if it can jump from 800k at the time of submission, to 2,060,000 hopefully not too much later, I think you may be underestimating how many people can talk abotu nothing, and how fast google can make that meaningless blather available to the world.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go google this post.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you're doubting the freshness of the term, try searching in Google Groups instead. A usenet search can often give you a better picture of how a term or phrase evolved through culture.
"Black Friday" - 11,000 results dating back to at least 1993.
"Cyber Monday" - 20 results, all but one were indeed posted within the past week. The other one is in Russian, and doesn't actually appear to contain the term.
So, if there was such a thing as "Cyber Monday" prior to this Thanksgiving, nobody seemed to know about it, and they sure as heck weren't discussing it.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
It all depends on how you search...
Without quotation marks I get 5.2M results. With marks, I get 706k and the top 100 results (ok, so I scanned the top 100) are all news sites printing or reprinting stories.
I have to agree here. It appears that someone coined the term and something happened. I'd love to see the historical data off some of the larger E-tailers to see if the term increased sales. If so, I'm predicting that retailers will start naming different days in the year to try to get more sales.
BTW, in case no one knew this Black Friday is historically a day when something bad happens.
Oh - and it looks like "Cyber Monday" is now on Wikipedia as well. Oddly enough, its pending deletion...
The term Cyber Monday is a fairly recent term which refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Similar to Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year when retail stores often offer great deals, "Cyber Monday" has in recent years been a busy day for online retailers, and one in which online stores offer similarly low prices.
[edit]
Origin of term
The term "Cyber Monday" is a neologism invented by the National Retail Federation, and was never in common use within the ecommerce community. According to shop.org, Scott Silverman, the Executive Director of the company, coined the term during a meeting in August or September 2005 to describe an emerging trend first noticed on the Monday after Thanksgiving, 2004.