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September 23, 2004
The History of the Greeting Card: e-Cards
According to iMedia connection, online greeting cards sales accounted for less than 1% of the 7.5 billion dollar greeting card market in 2003. Putting that into perspective, an estimated $52 million in e-cards were bought and sold in 2003. An ecommerce analyst at Jupiter Research projects this number will increase to $79 million by 2007. Not bad for an industry that had been growing at less than 4% a year prior to 1996 when Blue Mountain Arts created the online category.
This miniscule percentage held by the e-card category is based mostly on the fact that the leading site offering e-cards, Hallmark.com, does not charge for its online greeting cards. And there are many more free e-card sites; notably 123greetings.com, the largest free e-greeting site on the Internet.
According to 123greetings, they have been on the Web since 1995 but Blue Mountain Arts brought the e-card to worldwide attention being in the top ten web properties in 1998. In 1999 they sold bluemountain.com for $780 million dollars to Excite.com. Only two years later, almost to the date, Excite sold bluemountain.com to American Greetings for just $35 million dollars. And within two months, American Greetings introduced paid membership for e-cards. History was once again made in greeting cards.
Posted by photocartoonist at September 23, 2004 9:34 PM