Where the Joys Are

Forget those two kids who deliriously unwrapped their spanking-new Nintendo 64 some eight years ago. This Christmas, it was iPod gift cards that digital media fans were finding in their stockings. A report coming out of Web tracker Hitwise indicates that traffic to Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes store soared 413% higher on Dec. 25 over last year's already robust showing.

This should come as a relief to Apple fans who may have been threatened by the emergence of "must have" gadgetry like Garmin (Nasdaq: GRMN) and TomTom GPS navigation systems, next-generation video-game consoles, and even a new rival in portable media players with last month's rollout of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune.

On that final front, Apple can rest easy. Hitwise is also indicating that traffic to Apple's store outnumbered those going to Zune.net to load up on digital goodies by a 30-to-1 margin.

This doesn't mean that Apple sold 30 times as many iPods over the holidays, because Apple has had five years to establish its base. In fact, Microsoft's Zune is so new that we won't know for another holiday season or two if Zune giftcards are even popular gifts. However, in a promising Hitwise note, traffic to Zune's digital music store shot up 1,030% on Dec. 25, 2006, over the previous week's Monday.

Some other e-tail nuggets out of the Hitwise report:

• Traffic to Hitwise's 100 most-visited domestic online retailing sites was up just 6.2% in the week ending Dec. 23 over the same week a year earlier.
• Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) remained the top dog of those 100 sites, with a 13.2% slice of that traffic, followed distantly by Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) at 9.1%.
• Consumer electronics led the way, with Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) and Circuit City (NYSE: CC) showing the biggest traffic gains at their sites (up 17.1% and 20.7%, respectively).

So, there's plenty of good news and cheer to go 'round, even as we will surely be back to dissect the numbers critically -- again -- this time next year.

Microsoft and Wal-Mart are Inside Value newsletter service selections, while Amazon.com, Best Buy, and Garmin have been recommended by David Gardner for his Stock Advisor subscribers.

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a kid at heart. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has a disclosure policy .