Who Uses the Web and for What?

Today, there are over 37 million adults in North America with access to the Internet. 24 million of them actually use their access, and 18 million use their Internet access time to browse the World Wide Web. The total amount of time spent cruising the Web is greater than the time spent using all other Internet services combined, and is roughly equivalent to the time North Americans spend watching rented videotapes.

Some of the survey information used in this section is Copyright 1995 CommerceNet Consortium/Nielsen Media Research.

The number of people using the Internet is increasing so rapidly that if the growth rate were to continue at the current rate, by 2003 every person in the world would be on the Web!
Increasingly, people are using the Web to conduct business. Today, over 50 percent of the sites on the Web are commercial (with a .com domain name). Over half of the users of the Web look for products at least occasionally and-since Web users are predominantly upscale, well educated, and affluent-business is paying attention. Expect Web growth in the near future to continue to be driven and driven hard by business expansion into cyberspace.
But Web surfers also use the Net for more traditional telecommunications purposes. Three-fourths browse the Web. Two-thirds exchange e-mail. One- third download software by FTP. One in three takes part in discussion groups, and one in five is active in multimedia.

Content

The World Wide Web didn't get its name by accident. It truly is a web that encompasses just about every topic in the world. A quick look at the premier topic index on the Web, Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), lists topics as diverse as art, world news, sports, business, libraries, classified advertising, education, TV, science, fitness, and politics (see fig. 1.9). You can't get much more diverse than that! There are literally thousands of sites listed on Yahoo! under each of these topics and many more.