And more... ___________________________________________________ Andreas Ramos [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.andreas.com Net-usage snapshot is full of details David Plotnikoff http://www.mercurycenter.com/columnists/plotnikoff/docs/dp070598.htm VERY few things are predictable or constant in this digital world. But you can safely bet that every six weeks a market-research firm or Net-traffic auditor will release another report purporting to be the definitive picture of who's going where on the Web. These are, in effect, blurry statistical snapshots of a target that refuses to stand still or even slow down. Now, the Atlanta-based Web-measurement firm RelevantKnowledge (best known for its monthly site-traffic reports) and the Boston-based market-research giant IDC have teamed to produce an uncommonly large and detailed snapshot. Their joint report, ``Web Usage Trends 1998,'' (to be released in four quarterly installments) doesn't just look at the the demographics of the Web audience or the traffic to specific sites. It also charts usage patterns defined by both time online and traffic to certain categories of sites. The report is based on click-tracking data gathered from a set of 2,000 home Web users age 12 or older, weighted to be representative of the estimated 35 million home Web users. Much of the material in the voluminous (109-page) document covering the first quarter serves only to confirm things most of us already knew intuitively: Persons over 50 are underrepresented on the Web, when compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Males are still slightly overrepresented. (The study pegs the home-user market as 54 percent male/46 percent female, compared with the overall U.S. population, which is 48 percent male/52 percent female.) But there are some factoids hidden amongst the charts and tables that I found to be quite remarkable. Each of these could be the catalyst for an entire separate survey: When it comes to consumer use, there are virtually no regional disparities. Web usage broken down by geographic area is in line with the distribution of the U.S. population overall. While Netizens in the Bay Area or Seattle may think that they're at the red-hot center of Net culture, people on the West Coast are not more likely to use the Web than their counterparts in any other region. 41 percent of Web users spend 3.5 hours or less on the Web per month. And 17 percent spend an hour or less. So-called ``die-hards'' who spend 30 hours or more per month made up just 10 percent of the Web audience. Once again, this brings us directly to one of the most intractable problems in the whole Net-numbers game: There is no single definition of who counts as a Net user. The usual guesstimates we hear for the total U.S. population of Netizens (40 million to 60 million) tend to lose their grandeur pretty quickly when you realize four in 10 of those people may not even log on an hour a week. The audience for adult entertainment sites is relatively affluent (almost a quarter have household incomes of $75,000 or more). But that group is also among the least-educated clusters of Web users enumerated by the study. Nearly 30 percent have high school diplomas or less. I have absolutely no idea what this means. Perhaps some social psychologist will get a federal grant to study the pornographic tastes of rich, dumb guys. And aside from those guys, someone should look into what's going on with the 20 percent of porn patrons who are women. Surely, there's got to be a story there. Almost one-fifth of the visitors to adult sites are 12-17 years old. And of all the site categories in the study, the adult sector has the second-highest proportion of visitors who are males 12-17 years old, behind online gaming. This is a ticking bomb on at least two fronts: First off, it means the technical barriers that are currently in place may not be as effective as parents or site administrators would like to believe. Beyond that, it's certainly an enticement for censorship-minded legislators to take another run at broad content controls that would affect both adults and children. ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
