Last week Nielsen/NetRatings announced that 52 percent of the US population was on the web during July. Back in May, Nielsen announced results of another study showing that 64% of all Americans over 12 years of age had used the Internet in the past year. And, 31% of those Americans over twelve report going online every day. That's a clue that the net is becoming more and more important.
So, let's take a look at what various surveys and studies are telling us about who's online and what they're doing and what they find important.
In the US, the population online looks more and more like the mainstream every day. But folks online are still more affluent and educated than the population as a whole. In fact, the only statistic that pretty much matches the whole population is gender-51% female and 49% male.
In the rest of the world, the online percentages are lower. Taylor Nelson Sofres found that the average percent of the population online was 27 percent.
So what are all those folks doing? They're almost all using email. Depending on what surveys you read, the percent of online users that use email varies upward from around 85%.
Folks are online more and more. Nielsen tells us that US Internet users spend ten hours a month online, up twenty-six percent in the last year. They're visiting less sites, though. The average user visited ten unique sites in July 1999 compared with twelve a year earlier.
They're shopping and buying online, too. The buying is mostly small, packaged items and replacement and gift items-the sort of stuff you don't have to try on or feel. And "making purchases" is the fastest growing online activity according to Roper Starch.
The shopping is turning out to be pretty important, though. Researching large purchases on the web is becoming a common behavior. One study has 40% of all automobiles purchased in the US being researched online. And online research is changing the way folks deal with car dealers, but also with physicians and other professionals.
Roper Starch Worldwide and America Online released their Cyberstudy in November 1999. They found that folks who've been online at least three years engage in more online activities than those with less time online. That's true for almost any activity whether it's shopping, reading news or using search engines. What's important to these folks?
Information is very important. Folks go online for information, including news. The percentage of US users who go online every day for news is almost three times what it was in 1998.
It also appears that folks who use the net generally value information more highly than folks who aren't online. A recent UCLA study, due to be published in full in October, found that Internet users rated books and newspapers as "Important" or "Very Important" more than their non-wired counterparts.
If getting the word out and protests are part of the information age, then that's big online, too. Disgruntled employees, customers who feel they've been wronged, union activists and issue-carriers of all stripes have found that setting up a website is a good way to tell their stories. That's resulted in most large companies having at least one "anti-" site out there on the web. There was even a Russian protest site up within days of the news of the sinking of the submarine Kursk.
So, information stuff is hot, especially news and anything time- or money-sensitive. What's not hot is online entertainment. Says who? How about Ted Leonsis, president of the Interactive Properties Group at AOL: "To date, digital entertainment has been a failure."
Maybe that's because video is so important to the companies that sell entertainment these days and video just doesn't work well on today's web. Don't forget that over 95% of folks connect to the web using a dialup service. The newsletter Broadband Intelligence, in fact, says that only about 1.5% of US households had some kind of broadband connection at the end of 1999.
Digital books have "underwhelmed" the world, as well. Sure, Stephen King managed to get almost half a million folks to download a short novel earlier this year. But by some estimates ninety percent of those who downloaded the book never read it. They got it for the novelty.
The bottom line seems to be this. More and more folks are going online every day. As they learn to use the net (usually over a period of around three months), the net becomes more and more important to them.
The Roper Starch Cyberstudy found that 66% would rather have an Internet connection than a telephone or television if they were stranded on the proverbial desert island.
They spend more and more time online. Folks online over three years spend 10.5 hours per week online, almost four times the US average.
And they find more things to do, the longer they're online. Experienced users are twice as likely to check their stocks online, twice as likely to use online banking services, and three times as likely to trade stocks online as newcomers.
All of these general trends are likely to accelerate. Expect to find more and more helpful stuff online that makes your experience more valuable. In fact, given the trends, it's probably a good idea to spend at least a little of your time online each week looking for that new, valuable service.
This feature appeared on 21 August 2000
