The metamorphosis of Cyber Monday

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I once worked with an editor who bristled every year at this time. The reason? Stories about “Cyber Monday.”

It was all marketing hokum, he said. How are the supposed online shopping numbers even verifiable, he’d ask. He questioned running Cyber Monday stories even as every business news competitor with a homepage ran multiple versions throughout the day.

Today, it’s a hot trending topic on Twitter, and a promoted one no less, as well as ubiquitous hashtag (#CyberMonday). The U.S. Attorney General’s Office used the occasion to unveil a sting netting 82 Web domain names for allegedly peddling counterfeit goods. And various reports out Monday are predicting a record 106.9 million Americans shopping online.

Shoppers are taking advantage of one-day deals and free shipping and in the process boosting Cyber Monday sales almost 11 percent over last year.

That prediction comes from Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, in tandem with BIGresearch — which conducted the shopper poll — and that’s only fitting.

It was Shop.org, after all, that created Cyber Monday in the first place. As my former colleague Liz Farmer wrote on this blog last year, the term was coined in 2005 after a number of retailers reported increased online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

One theory was that people returned to work and took advantage of their employer’s high-speed Web access to knock out some shopping in between meetings and sifting through e-mails that piled up over the holiday. That notion seems pretty quaint now, of course, considering the ubiquity of broadband Internet access. Shop.org and BIGresearch found that 12.1 percent of the people it surveyed will shop on Cyber Monday from work this year, compared with 13.5 percent last year.

In any event, what once may have been an inspired marketing idea is now mainstream. Many major news outlets devoted prime reporting resources and online real estate to the story, with pictures of Amazon.com warehouses and comments from equity market strategists opining on what it all means for the overall economy.

Even my former colleague seems to have come around. Along with stories on President Obama’s federal pay freeze and the Kraft Foods battle with Starbucks, the website he helps oversee also has a prominently placed story on Cyber Monday. I hope he’s OK.