|
It's
Here to Stay!
The
numbers are staggering. We count adult Internet users by the tens of
millions now. Near the end of 1999, more than 112 million people in the
U.S. and Canada had Internet access.1
Internet commerce quickly grew into hundreds of millions of sales dollars,
and U.S. online sales are projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2002.2
E-mail messages number in the trillions
each year, and in December, 1999, 270 million e-mail boxes had been set up
in the U.S.—roughly 2.5 e-mail boxes per user.3
In an average 30-day
period in the Fall of 1999, approximately 74 million U.S. adults (age 18
and older), or 37 percent of the adult U.S. population, used the Internet
at home or at work. This represents an increase of nearly 70 percent, up
from the 43.7 million users reported by Media Mark in the Spring of 1998.4
Approximately 98 million
American adults had access to the Internet by late 1999, according to the
same report, up 54 percent from the previous reporting period. Media Mark
also reported that 50.8 percent of these users are men, 49.2 percent
women.5
Reports vary, however.
The Nielsen Corporation, known best for its TV-ratings reports, calculated
that in November of 1999 the universe of U.S. Web surfers over the age of
two reached 118 million, with 74 million active during that month. These
users spent 11.1 million hours on line.6
Nielsen also reported
that U.S. Web users logged six sessions per week, visited six unique
sites, spent just over 2 hours and 46 minutes online per week, and viewed
a page for an average of 56 seconds.7
To keep track of statistics such as these, visit the Nua Ltd.
(well-publicized Internet strategic consulting firm) site at http://www.nua.net/surveys/how_many_online/n_america.html.
Time
magazine (March 22, 1999) reported that approximately 21 million U.S.
households had more than one personal computer and predicted that by 2003
that number will jump to 31 million. Home offices will grow from 37
million to 50 million by then, and the most frequent use for all those
millions of PCs is, as you no doubt have already guessed, the Internet.8
America Online now has
over 22.2 million users9—and
that’s only one access provider, although it is the largest single
source used for connecting people to the Internet. Boston-based Yankee
Group (http://www.yankeegroup.com) reports that Internet access should
grow at a compound annual rate of 21 percent over the next 5 years, during
which U.S. users will spend $56 billion for access. The Internet already
penetrates one-fourth of U.S. homes, and that figure is expected to rise
to one-third by the end of 1999 and to two-thirds by 2003. Yankee Group
says it found that “the Internet is now the No. 1 use for home
computers.”10
Internet usage is also
growing outside the U.S. Nua Ltd. estimated that as of September 1999, 201
million users were connected to the Internet worldwide. Of these, 47.15
million were in Europe and 33.61 million in Asia and the Pacific Rim.11
The Computer Industry Almanac
(http://www.c-i-a.com) predicts that by the year 2002, 490 million
people around the world will have Internet access.12
|
