The Akamai Net Usage Index for Retail is the world's first and only daily Web traffic benchmark that tracks the world's online retail habits. Akamai, as the content delivery platform for more than 270 global online retail companies, has a unique view into the daily Web traffic of these sites. Akamai has been in business since 1999, and serves content on behalf of a large majority of the world's leading retailers. Akamai helps securely enable more than $36 billion in annual e-commerce for its online retail customers, and is therefore in a unique position to be able to track visits on a global scale.

Following is an explanation of how we measure visitors / minute:

KEY

V/M = measures current millions of visitors per minute* to aggregate retail sites (this number reflects the current rate in each geographic region)

% = measures the percent above or below the average of visitors per minute for that time of day, and day of week, within each geographic region, based on an 8-week average (with data points taken at 5 minute intervals)

* for each minute, Akamai is measuring the number of visitors that viewed a page or more from retail sites during that minute