That makes nine quarters in a row for positive year-over-year growth in U.S. e-commerce spending. In fact, that’s five in a row for double digit growth.

E-commerce spending in the U.S. reached a record $161.5 billion for all of 2011, according to the firm. That’s up 13% from 2010.

comScore’s highlights the following:

• The top-performing online product categories were: Digital Content & Subscriptions, Jewelry & Watches, Consumer Electronics, Toys & Hobbies, and Computer Software. Each category grew at least 18 percent vs. year ago.
• Ten individual days in Q4 surpassed $1 billion in online spending, led by Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) at $1.251 billion. Monday, Dec. 5 ranked second at $1.178 billion, followed by Green Monday (Dec. 12) at $1.133 billion.
• 52 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, representing an all-time high. The previous high was Q4 2010 at 49 percent.
• Smartphones and tablets played a growing role in online shopping, with consumes increasingly using smartphones to check prices and product features while physically in a retail store.

“The fourth quarter of 2011 capped off what was yet another strong year for online retail, one in which every quarter achieved double-digit increases versus the prior year,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “In the face of continuing uncertainty regarding the U.S. economy, consumers increasingly went online for their shopping needs. Price and convenience continue to be the critical value drivers for e-commerce, and unless those conditions change we can expect to see more channel-shifting to online in 2012 and perhaps even an acceleration in the current growth trend.”

According to the firm, Yahoo was in second place at 11% (up from 10.9% the year before), leaving Microsoft, Google and AOL each with less than 5%.

That would make three years in a row that Facebook led the charge. And why not? Who has better targeting, and where are users spending more time?

Facebook, of course, is expected to file for its huge IPO this week, and this news should only help. Add that to the various ways Facebook is expanding its advertising offerings.

This month, for one, ads came to the Facebook news feed.

The company is incentivizing advertisers to stay with Facebook with a 45% reduction in CPCs, according to TBG Digital’s recent Global Facebook Advertising Report Q4.

Recently, we’ve seen reports of Facebook cold emailing businesses, offering phone consultation on Facebook advertising.

Facebook is expected to start offering mobile ads soon, and there’s always that possibility that the company will eventually launch an AdSense like network for publishers. That one’s pure speculation, but come on. How could they not?

According to comScore, Brazil was one of only seven markets where Facebook didn’t dominate the social media channel, as of October. Other markets included: China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Poland and Russia.

Here’s what the social media landscape looked like in Brazil by the end of the year:

“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”

Some areas where Facebook saw growth in Brazil:

And the demographic profile:

By the way, Facebook is claiming about 10% of the world’s population these days.

U.S. internet denizens watched a lot of online video in December – 23.2 hours per viewer. Throughout the entire month, a total of 182 million users watched a whopping 43.5 billion videos.

As far as unique viewers go, Google sites led the charge nearly tripling up the next closest competitor, VEVO. Google claimed 157.2 million unique viewers who watched 21.9 billion videos in December. Google sites also held high viewer engagement with about 7.9 hours of watching per user.

Hulu, who finished in 8th place in terms of unique viewers with 31.2 million, also had impressive engagement. Hulu users spent a little over 3 hours on average watching videos on the site.

Americans also viewed a total of 7.2 billion ads last month, spanning 3 billion minutes. These video ads accounted for 14.1% of all the online videos viewed in the month of December. Hulu was tops in terms of video ad impressions with around 1.5 billion. They were closely followed by adapt.tv with 1.1 billion and Tremor Video with 900 million.

Finally, VEVO is still the top YouTube partner with 53.5 million viewers. They also had the highest engagement numbers with 66.9 minutes per viewer over the course of the month.

A couple of bonus figures: 85.3% of the entire U.S. internet community viewed online videos. The length of those online videos averaged out to 5.8 minutes, and the average ad was only 24 seconds long.

Covering market shares of search engine use for December 2011, Bing crept into its second-place ranking with 15.1% of all search queries, which was a small increase from November 2011 when it had 15.0% but enough to push Yahoo down in the rankings. Yahoo, which claimed 15.1% of search queries in November 2011, slipped in market shares as it only had 14.5% for December. Again, that doesn’t really look like a lot but in a competition to determine who gets to sit next to Google, every little bit goes a long way.

And speaking of Google, it continues to enjoy its status of King of the Search Engine Mountain as it had 65.9% shares of all search queries in December. This was a bit of an increase from the previous month when it had 65.4%, but the holidays will do that for a search engine.

Apparently, though, Yahoo didn’t benefit from any holiday-driven traffic. When records for online shopping were being set last month it’s not a far leap of faith to assume that more people are spending more time on the Internet and yet… they weren’t doing that Internet thing they do with Yahoo.

There were actually 10 separate days that surpassed $1 billion in spending. Cyber Monday, at the top of the list, ranked at the top (for the second year in a row) at $1.25 billion.

Here’s a look at growth from last year:

And the sales pattern through the season for the last five years:

“The 2011 online holiday shopping finished with slightly more than $37 billion in spending, up about 15 percent versus year ago,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “With brick-and-mortar holiday retail estimated to have grown about 4 percent this year, it’s clear that e-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices.”

“Consumers were especially attracted to the deals and discounts available through digital channels – particularly free shipping, which occurred on well over half of transactions this season,” he added. “Despite their continuing price sensitivity, consumers felt a bit more comfortable opening up their wallets this year, although this appears to have occurred as a result of a decline in the savings rate. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, at least on the basis of top line growth, this was a Merry Christmas for many online retailers. What will remain unknown until retailers report their financial year end results is whether the aggressive pricing and free shipping offers came at the cost of lower margins.”

In case you missed it, this should give you a good idea of the things people have been buying.

Those numbers are for the first 56 daqys of the November – December holidays season, with the most recent week (ending Dec. 25) bringing in $2.8 billion on its own (up 16% from last year).

“Holiday e-commerce spending has remained strong throughout the season, and we have now reached a record $35 billion in U.S. online sales for the season-to-date,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “We can now say with certainty that the $1.25 billion spent on Cyber Monday will rank it as the heaviest online spending day of the season for the second consecutive year, but we should also note that it was accompanied by nine other billion dollar spending days this year.”

comScore points out a dramatic increase in Christmas Day purchases of digital content and subscriptions, including: music, TV, movie, ebook and app downloads, over the last few years. With smartphones and tablets rising in popularity, it’s not hard to see why this would be the case.

In fact, iOS and Android both had pretty good holidays. Android reported 3.7 million device activations over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

“On an average day during the 2011 holiday season-to-date (Nov. 1 – Dec. 26), Digital Content & Subscriptions accounted for 2.8 percent of retail e-commerce sales, but on Christmas Day the category accounted for more than 20 percent of sales,” comScore says. “Consistent with past years, comScore expects sales for this category of products to remain elevated throughout the entire week following Christmas Day.”

This week should be a pretty big week, as people spend their holiday gift money.

Here’s a look at that complaint, courtesy of PaidContent:

Shortly thereafter, comScore countersued Nielsen and its Net Ratings division, claiming it was infringing upon its patents.

That whole mess is apparently over now (at least for the next few years), as the two measurement firms have settled. Nielsen and comScore put out a joint press release, which says the following:

Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN), a leading global provider of information and analytics around what consumers watch and buy, and comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the companies have settled their patent disputes.

This agreement settles both patent suits filed by the parties in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Ever since Cyber Monday kicked off the blitzkrieg of online shopping this year by becoming the most lucrative shopping day ever, the amount of money spent by shoppers has consistently trumped every corresponding week from 2010. In this year and last, sales steadily increased leading up to the big Day of Unwrapping (i.e., Christmas Day) with the penultimate week seeing a huge gush of money from consumers. I’d suspect that the week before Christmas is a huge shopping day for online retailers because those present-buying procrastinators wanna make sure the gifts arrive in time. This year, however, has seen a pronounced increase in money being spent for each interval that comScore recorded.

Increases in online retail sales have been observed to increase with each passing year recently so the fact that people spent more money this year than 2010 isn’t completely surprising. What makes this year so significant is just how crazy Americans went with their holiday shopping. It’s like everybody wasn’t quite content with merely spending some more money this year, so Americans decided that they didn’t like too many figures in their bank accounts and spent a lot more money. $6.3 billion worth of a lot more!

I guess some people think this is good news, but that more money than ever is being spent online raises an interesting question: given the tax loophole associated with online sales, how much tax revenue was lost in last week’s boom (and for the total $32 billion spent this holiday season, really). I’d like to see that analysis. I bet the different tiers of government want to see those stats, too. A loss of tax monies like that might not matter so much at a federal level, but that could have some heavy impact on struggling municipalities.

Anyways. So how’s your holiday shopping going? Anybody out there contribute to last week’s eruption of online shopping? Let us know with your comments below.

$18.7 billion has already been spent online during the holiday season to date – a 15% increase compared to last year. There were three days last week that surpassed $1 billion in spending. Cyber Monday, of course, was the largest at $1.25 billion.

Tuesday hit $1.12 billion. Wednesday hit $1.03 billion. These three days were three of the four heaviest online spending days in history, comScore says. The other one was Cyber Monday last year.

“Cyber Monday kicked the week off with a bang as consumers opened their wallets to the tune of $1.25 billion, but it was only the beginning of a very strong week of online holiday spending,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Tuesday and Wednesday followed with billion dollar spending days, helping Cyber Week reach a record weekly total of nearly $6 billion in spending. As the deals from this week expire, it will be important to see the degree to which consumers return to the same retailers to continue their holiday shopping, thereby helping improve retailers’ profit margins, or if we experience a pullback in consumer spending – which has occurred in previous years – before promotional offers and spending intensity pick back up in earnest around mid-December.”

Here’s a year-to-year comparison:

Free shipping has clearly played a big role in all of this. Here’s another look at the growth of this:

Here’s a chart showing how important this is to people:

“Free shipping is one of the most important incentives that online retailers must provide during the holiday season to ensure that shoppers will convert into buyers,” added Mr. Fulgoni. “Consumers have come to expect free shipping during the holiday promotion periods, and retailers, in turn, have realized that they must offer this incentive if they want to maximize their share of consumer spending – especially at the outset of the shopping season. In fact, more than three-quarters of consumers say that free shipping is important to them when making an online purchase, and nearly half say they will abandon their shopping cart at checkout if they find free shipping is not being offered.”

As the holidays get closer and closer, I’m guessing speedy delivery will continue to rise in importance to consumers. This is probably one reason that Google is looking at getting more involved in this area (to compete with Amazon).