Puff Bar, a disposable electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS), was the ENDS brand most commonly used by U.S. youth in 2021. We explored whether Puff Bar’s rise in marketplace prominence was detectable through advertising, retail sales, social media, and web traffic data sources. We retrospectively documented potential signals of interest in and uptake of Puff Bar in the United States using metrics based on advertising (Numerator and Comperemedia), retail sales (NielsenIQ), social media (Twitter, via Sprinklr), and web traffic (Similarweb) data from January 2019 to June 2022. We selected metrics based on (1) data availability, (2) potential to graph metric longitudinally, and (3) variability in metric. We graphed metrics and assessed data patterns compared to data for Vuse, a comparator product, and in the context of regulatory events significant to Puff Bar. The number of Twitter posts that contained a Puff Bar term (social media), Puff Bar product sales measured in dollars (sales), and the number of visits to the Puff Bar website (web traffic) exhibited potential for surveilling Puff Bar due to ease of calculation, comprehensibility, and responsiveness to events. Advertising tracked through Numerator and Comperemedia did not appear to capture marketing from Puff Bar’s manufacturer or drive change in marketplace prominence. This study demonstrates how quantitative changes in metrics developed using advertising, retail sales, social media, and web traffic data sources detected changes in Puff Bar’s marketplace prominence. We conclude that low-effort, scalable, rapid signal detection capabilities can be an important part of a multi-component tobacco surveillance program.

Puff Bar, a disposable electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS), was the ENDS brand most commonly used by U.S. youth in 2021. We explored whether Puff Bar’s rise in marketplace prominence was detectable through advertising, retail sales, social media, and web traffic data sources. We retrospectively documented potential signals of interest in and uptake of Puff Bar in the United States using metrics based on advertising (Numerator and Comperemedia), retail sales (NielsenIQ), social media (Twitter, via Sprinklr), and web traffic (Similarweb) data from January 2019 to June 2022. We selected metrics based on (1) data availability, (2) potential to graph metric longitudinally, and (3) variability in metric. We graphed metrics and assessed data patterns compared to data for Vuse, a comparator product, and in the context of regulatory events significant to Puff Bar. The number of Twitter posts that contained a Puff Bar term (social media), Puff Bar product sales measured in dollars (sales), and the number of visits to the Puff Bar website (web traffic) exhibited potential for surveilling Puff Bar due to ease of calculation, comprehensibility, and responsiveness to events. Advertising tracked through Numerator and Comperemedia did not appear to capture marketing from Puff Bar’s manufacturer or drive change in marketplace prominence. This study demonstrates how quantitative changes in metrics developed using advertising, retail sales, social media, and web traffic data sources detected changes in Puff Bar’s marketplace prominence. We conclude that low-effort, scalable, rapid signal detection capabilities can be an important part of a multi-component tobacco surveillance program.

Online retail websites have made strong traffic gains due to the global coronavirus pandemic as large parts of the population are staying at home and ordering items online which they usually would purchase in-store. Amazon.com had a monthly traffic of almost 3.2 billion visitors in 2022, followed by eBay.com with nearly 590 million visits on each month.

As of October 16, 2024, CaitlynMinimalist was the Etsy seller with the most sales on the platform in the previous year. The store, which sells jewelry, recorded over 680,000 purchases by Etsy buyers in 12 months. Esty’s Overview Etsy, an online marketplace, generates revenue from three primary segments: marketplace revenues, this includes fees for sales transactions and listings of products; seller service revenues; and other revenues which includes third-party payment processor fees. The annual revenue of Etsy has steadily increased over the past years, reaching over 2.7 billion U.S. dollars, which in part is due to a steady increase of investment into their advertising. Usage of Etsy When ranking the leading websites by share of visits in the United States, esty.com was fourth, outranked by amazon.com, ebay.com, and walmart.com. Still, over the past years, the number of active Etsy sellers has increased, reaching over 9 million in 2023. That year, Etsy's active buyers also grew, reaching over over 96 million, a new high for the company.