overview sizing traffic navigation demographics methodologies digital divides jargon sources lies & web stats

demographics This page highlights studies of who's online and the value of online activity.      who's online? Figures for users of the Web are problematical. One estimate suggests that the number will grow to 707 million in 2002. The US Department of Commerce (DOC) and national Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) reports on Falling Through The Net provide a detailed picture of who's online, analysing the 'telecommunications and information technology gap in America'. There's a detailed consideration of the 'digital divide' later in this guide.  The State of the Net 2000 report is a snapshot by the US Internet Council (USIC) of access, ecommerce, traffic and other Internet statistics. While some of the figures are suspect, the report is a useful compilation. USIC's 1999 report is also online. The Computer Industry Almanac claims that the US has over 110 million users in 1999 (43% of the global figure of 259 users), with Australia just ahead of Brazil at 6.83 million users. It projects 765 million users (ie around 10% of the population) by 2005.  All very eye of newt and foot of toad .... such estimates are necessarily problematical.  In Australia the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have released reports on who's online and whether they'll be joined by other surfers in future.  The June 2000 NOIE-Yellow Pages report offers figures, somewhat contentious, about use of the web by small, medium and large-scale enterprises. Much of that report is inconsistent with the more credible December 2000 report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) regarding business use of IT, including use of email, etailing and online presences. The May 2000 figures from the ABS claimed that 54% (3.8 million) of Australian homes have a computer; 51% of regional homes have a machine, a 21% increase in three months, and nationally a third of Australian homes "have Internet access". 46% of all adults accessed the web in the preceding 12 months. As noted in our guide to the Web, Paul Clemente's The State of the Net (New York, McGraw-Hill 98) almost by default has become a standard source in the industry, despite controversy over alleged appropriation of academic research.      where are the dollars? Research into the economic size of the Web featured at the 1999 US conference on Understanding The Digital Economy: Data, Tools & Research mentioned above. We recommend the papers by Haltiwanger and Varian in particular. Our economy guide discusses particular issues in more detail and concludes with detailed statistical references.  Material at the Vanderbilt Uni eLab site is also of value.  At a global level the OECD's 1997 report on Measuring Electronic Commerce remains of value. Measuring the Internet Economy, the October 1999 report by the University of Texas and Cisco, is decidedly upbeat but worth examination for economic projections. It's available at the Internet Indicators site. Lada Adamic & Bernardo Huberman in their May 1999 paper The Nature of Markets in the World Wide Web - based on an examination of  120,000 sites - argue that statistics for visits to sites are characteristic of a winner-take-all market.  Whether that will remain the case in future is unclear; we believe that effective marketing online and offline will offset disadvantages faced by many Australian sites who aren't 'winning' the traffic.      and the languages GlobalReach, an internet marketing company, has published figures on the languages used by those online. Those figures are of course disputed and are inconsistent with some of the data featured on this page. They suggest that    next page (methodologies)