This page considers online greeting cards.

It covers -

• introduction
• precursors
• industry
• issues
• studies
• landmarks

It supplements discussion of messaging and security elsewhere on this site. It is complemented by a note on postal systems.

     introduction

Online greeting cards (sometimes referred to as e-greetings, e-postcards or e-cards) have attracted attention as an online embodiment of print formats such as -

• Christmas cards and cards for other religious/secular festivals such as Easter, Valentine's Day, Father's Day and Mother's Day
• Get Well cards
• Engagement and Wedding cards
• Birthday Cards
• Joke cards
• place-specific postcards

They have also attracted criticism as spam, as a mechanism for the delivery of malware (viruses, spyware) and as the basis for businesses that expired with the collapse of the dot-com bubble.

e-Greetings have essentially taken two forms.

The first involves users accessing a card vendor's website, selecting one of several images (static or animated), adding a short text and then supplying the recipient's email address. The card is then either electronically mailed by the vendor to that address or the recipient receives an email from the vendor indicating that a card has been addressed, with the recipient clicking on a link in that email (or entering an URL in a browser) to access the card.

The second form involves a user constructing an image on a personal computer (rather than on a vendor's web site) using graphics software. That software is typically proprietary in nature: it may be for general use or specific to card creation, eg offering a number of templates into which the user loads images and text. The user then distributes the card as an attachment to an email message or as a graphic inserted within an email. The format offers greater customisation than that available on an egreetings site.

     precursors

Emergence of the egreetings card was an extension of the traditional postcard and greeting card, media that can be traced to the beginning of printing (if not before) but that first became a mass phenomenon after the 1860s with advances in lithography, paper production and national postal systems.

Handmade paper greeting cards in Europe have been traced to the early 1400s, with for example crude woodcuts to celebrate religious festivals and more elaborate cards (some featuring purple and gold ink) on St Valentine's day or personal name days. The inadequacy of distribution mechanisms and the cost of paper meant that cards were essentially an elite pursuit. They did not really take off until the emergence of the 'penny post' (eg 1840 in the UK), sustained falls in the price of paper and card, and acceptance of technologies such as lithography. Adoption was also driven by emulation on a national and international basis, particularly with removal of restrictions that had sought to protect national postal services (eg the Private Mailing Card Act in the US during 1898 ended government restrictions on message cards).

Landmarks for the emergence of published cards in different genres are contested. European historians for example often attribute the first published Christmas card to artist John Horsley, commissioned in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole of what became the Victoria & Albert Museum. US writers promote Esther Howland as the progenitor of the contemporary valentines card, noting sale of her first handmade valentine in 1849. Boston printer Louis Prang has gained attention for 'deluxe editions' of Christmas cards as part of the Victorian invention of Christmas (trees, Santa Claus etc). Sales of Christmas, birthday and other 'event' cards were dwarfed by the explosive growth of postcards across all classes in Western economies.

Those sales provide a perspective on contemporary electronic mailing. It is estimated for example that some 600 million postcards, many in colour, were produced in France in 1906. Some 800 million were mailed in the UK in 1909. The US Post Office reported that in 1907 some 678 million cards were mailed, with many of those cards being printed overseas in another illustration that globalisation predates the internet and WTO. The Imperial German Post had transported over 122 million postcards in 1879

     industry

Growth slowed after the 1920s, reflecting reductions in the cost of moving people and in uptake of telecommunications by households in many countries. The card industry sought to achieve economies of scale (with for example significant concentration in the US and Germany) and to sustain growth through the invention of events such as Fathers Day and Mothers Day. Some leading businesses expanded into comic, mail order catalogue and magazine production, into directory printing, into board game manufacture, into gift shop and photo studio operation and even into broadcasting (eg Hallmark in the US). The industry has a larrge number of players but global production is dominated by a handful of giants. In the US for example Hallmark and American Greetings are claimed to have 45% and 40% respectively of the domestic greeting card market.

The US Greeting Card Association claims that US consumers currently purchase around seven billion greeting cards per year (with US$7.5 billion in retail sales).The average US household supposedly buys 30 individual cards in a year, with the average recipient getting over 20 cards per year, of which around a third are birthday cards. The GCA's UK counterpart claims £1.2 billion retail sales per year, with just under 2.5 billion cards and an average of 44 greeting cards bought per person. As of 2003 the Canadian market was reported to have annual retail sales of around C$750 million. Germans supposedly sent 617 million cards

Advent of the web saw several innovators launch online card services, quickly emulated by a wide range of small competitors seeking to fill particular niches or cover the whole market. Major operators gained media attention - much of it distinctly uncritical, evident in claims that e-cards would quickly supersede print formats and "vaporize the paper dinosaurs" - and high traffic figures. Bellwether site Blue Mountain for example served some 17 million electronic valentines day cards in 2000. An animated card featuring a Thanksgiving turkey singing 'I Will Survive' was supposedly sent to over 30 million people.

As the dot-com bubble gathered pace some operators were accordingly acquired for large sums. Excite@Home paid US$780 million for Blue Mountain in 1999, selling it two years later to print giant American Greetings for a mere US$35 million.

The early online card industry was built on expectations that consumers would have free access to cards, with site operators making money by exposing those users to advertisements during card selection or by commoditising personal information (eg hitting the sender and/or the recipient with promotional messages). Evolution of the industry was marked by the highly-publicised collapse of some servers, unsurprising given loads on those machines, and the demise of some operators who found that they were unable to gain sufficient revenue in a volatile market.

Many of the surviving operators accordingly shifted to some form of subscription service, with consumers paying for the right to send a specific or unlimited number of electronic cards each year. Collapse of the bubble also saw greater emphasis on animated novelties as consumers experienced (and often quickly wearied of) static images and on strategic alliances with major online portals.

The December 2000 Pew Internet Project's report on The holidays online: Emails and e-greetings outpace e-commerce suggested that 53% of the US online population (over 51 million people) sent email during December to relatives and friends to discuss the holidays or make plans. 32% of users sent e-greeting cards. Hispanics were more likely than other groups to have sent e-greeting cards (45% did so) and a gender gap in sending online greeting cards saw 38% of women send cards versus 27% of men.

     issues

Critics have identified a number of concerns regarding online greeting cards -

• consumer fatigue
• infections
• filtering

e-Greeting enthusiasts have claimed that online cards are more immediate or merely cheaper than those in paper formats. Others have claimed that cards off sites or a personal computer are more intimate than mass produced publications. That has provoked a rejoinder from traditional publishers that paper cards offer a richer sensation - visual and tactile - and may be perceived by recipients as more 'sincere' (or merely more respectful) than something despatched with a few keystrokes. They have also commented that most cards off sites are indeed mass produced and that, since many people lack the requisite design skills and tools, many cards created on personal cards look decidedly derivative. The answer probably lies in the eyes (or hands) of the beholder.

Boom era anxieties about anthrax and letter bombs (and hype about the failures of particular postal services) led some observers to promote e-cards as safer traditional paper cards. Ironically, many consumers conceptualise e-greetings as vectors for infection, rather than as a speedy risk-free alternative to the postage stamp & cardboard variety.

One reason is that some site operators have scraped contact details for provision to third parties. Another reason is that some sites have failed to achieve best practice, with security weaknesses for example allowing spammers to capture databases of e-card senders and recipients. Security analysts have recurrently noted that cards can infect a recipient's personal computer or other device and that sites may install trojans.

The willingness of consumers to open what's claimed to be a greeting, whether from an associate or from someone unknown, has led a range of offenders to exploit viruses that appropriate the address book on a personal computer and send fake e-cards that appear to be authorised by the owner of that machine. Other consumers have discovered that opening a card - or what is claimed to be a card - or visiting an e-greetings site results in illicit installation of pop-ups for an adult content or gambling site.

As a result some organisations (including Caslon Analytics) forbid staff from opening or sending e-cards. Some network operators comprehensively block receipt of messages from e-greetings services and seek to prevent circulation of animated attachments. That filtering has raised the ire of particular e-greeting services but is consistent with Australian and overseas law. In essence, a private network on the periphery of the net is not obligated to transfer any/all messages from a sender to a recipient within that network. A consequence has been that particular demographics have turned away from e-greetings, as there is little point sending a message that is likely to disappear into a filter before it reaches the intended reader.

A January 2004 Nielsen//NetRatings report, consistent with figures released by individual e-greetings site operators (and those for paper cards), claimed that 61.5% of senders were female. Age cohorts for visitors were as follows -

age up to 11 12 to 17 18 to 24 25 to 34 35 to 49 55 to 64 65 plus

% 1.9 7.21 5.25 16.36 31.30 16.68 10.52

Income cohorts for US visitors were claimed as follows -

US$ to 24,999 25,000 to 49,999 50,000 to 74,999  75,000 to 99,999 100,000 to 149,999 150,000 plus No response

% 8.84 28.3  26.87  15.84 11.42 6.40  2.32

     studies

Scholarly literature on e-greetings is distinctly thin and there have been no major studies of the e-cards industry. The 1998 paper by Linda Mooney & Sarah Brabant on Off the Rack: Store Bought Emotions and the Presentation of Self will be of interest to fans of Erving Goffman, as will be Jane Hobson's 2002 dissertation Texted love: a social-semiotic examination of greeting cards.

In contrast to studies of e-greetings there is an extensive, albeit often distinctly parochial, literature on printed postcards as a communications mechanism, industry, cultural phenomenon, artistic genre and subject of regulation (eg censorship).

Works of particular significance include Frank Staff's The Picture Postcard & Its Origins (London: Lutterworth Press 1966), Richard Carline's Pictures in the Post: the Story of the Picture Postcard (London: Gordon Fraser 1971)Frederick Alderson's The Comic Postcard in English Life (Rutland: Tuttle 1970), Roger Grant's Railroad Postcards in the Age of Steam (Iowa City: Uni of Iowa Press 1994), George & Dorothy Miller's Picture Postcards in the United States 1893-1918 (New York: Potter 1976).

Other pointers are here.

     landmarks

1982 Wesray buys Gibson Greetings for US$80.5m

1994 Hallmark acquires RHI Entertainment (tv programming and distribution), later renamed Hallmark Entertainment

1995 American Greetings acquires John Sands in Australia and New Zealand

1995 American Greetings launches site with America Online, Netscape and Microsoft

1996 Hallmark launches site

1999 Excite@Home pays US$780m for Blue Mountain

1999 American Greetings buys Gibson Greetings (inc 20% of Egreetings Network) for US$163m

1999 Hallmark.com relaunched as an B2C site offering gifts, e-cards and gourmet food products

2001 Blue Mountain acquired by American Greetings for US$35m

2001 American Greetings buys remaining 80% of Egreetings Network for US$28.6m, writes down US$33m on initial 20%

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