The Internet seems to be shrinking. True, the number of computers connected to the Net doubled over the past year, from 5 million to over 10 million. And the amount of data passing through the network has followed suit, as best as anyone can measure. But the tallies of wired people have suddenly gone into decline. A year or so ago, the number on everybody's lips was 30 million. That was then the most widely quoted estimate of the number of people on the Internet, worldwide. Today, best estimates cluster around 25 million.
Fuelled by the prospect of Net commerce, demographers are taking a more scientific look at estimates of Internet population. They're Finding that the numbers online are not all that early Net boosters had cracked them up to be. But while the quantity may be smaller than previously believed, as far as would-be Net merchants are concerned, the quality is much better. Far from a motley collection of hip-but-poor students and hackers, the population of the Internet is exactly the sort of people that companies want to talk to: 30-ish, well-educated and often in exactly the sorts of high-paying jobs that keep a steady flow of spendable cash sloshing into their bank accounts. Not coincidentally, they are also exactly the sorts of people who will want to talk amongst themselves over the Internet as they do the business that keeps up that cash flow.
To get a grip on the commercial demographics of the Internet, you need to answer three questions. How many people are on the Net? What kind of people are they? And what do they do when they're online? But even to begin to answer those questions, you need to get a grip on the amorphous, self-organising chaos that is the Internet.
Nothing is easy to measure on the Internet. No central administration registers or tracks the machines or the people connected to it. Indeed, only domain names are registered (eg, wired.co.uk); without an administrator to ensure that no two machines have the same name and/or number, real chaos could bring the Net to its knees. But even domain-name registration is itself decentralised and done country by country.
The InterNIC domain-name registration service is by far the Internet's biggest. It registers domains in the US as well as international corporations requesting .com domains. As of mid-May 1996, it contained 325,444 names, of which 89% belonged to corporations, and it was growing at about 12% a month.
The traditional method of counting computers on the Net has been to take a sort of automated census. A message is sent to each domain, asking for the addresses of all machines reachable from the outside. (This is the sort of information that computers provide automatically to enable them to communicate directly one to another.) In January of 1996, Network Wizards, a networking software company, performed just such a census _ and totted up 9,472,000 computers (even though about a third of the domains they tried to contact did not reply). For most of the Net's history, experts have estimated the number of people on the Net by multiplying the number of computers by the best guesstimate then available of the number of people who use each computer. For many years, five(ish) seemed a good number. But five(ish) has neither stood the test of time nor stood up to more statistically sound measuring techniques. Proper surveys, which telephone a random selection of people to find out who's on the Net and who's not, show that in fact the number of wired people per computer is probably closer to three, or even a bit under. That's why the Net appears to be shrinking. Predictably, the first proper surveys of Web usage concentrated on North America. In August 1995, Commerce-Net, a Californian consortium of companies developing technologies to do business on the Web, enlisted Nielsen to telephone 4,200 Americans with Net access to ask how they spend their time online. From the survey, Nielsen calculated that some 33 million people in the United States had access to the Internet, 22 million used that access and 17 million of those surfed the Web.
Recently, Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, two professors at Vanderbilt University's business school, argued that CommerceNet's survey was itself an overestimate. Ironically, Nielsen apparently failed to take proper statistical account of just how unusually rich and well-educated were the Internet users surveyed as compared to the overall population, and so its attempts to extrapolate from its sample went astray. The true population of the American Internet, argue Hoffman and Novak, is 29 million (about 15% of the adult population) with access to the Internet, 16 million (8%) who use it and 12 million (6%) surfing the Web.
More recent studies seem to confirm Hoffman and Novak's numbers _ and given the Internet's surging popularity, there is no shortage of studies, most of them summarised on Cyber-Atlas's useful Net-demographics Web page (www.cyberatlas.com). A study that Computer Intelligence (of La Jolla, California) released at the end of May 1996 counted about 15 million Internet users in the United States; one by The Wall Street Journal in March of 1996 counted 17.6 million on the Net in the United States and Canada. But all such studies are highly dependent on the exact definition of Internet user.
In late 1995, a market research firm called Find/SVP (located in New York City) conducted a study which tallied only 10 million Internet users, but the study demanded that respondents use both email and at least one other Internet application (like the Web) in order to be called Internet users. As well as adults, Find/SVP reckoned that just over 1 million American children also use the Net. Intriguingly, fully half of those surveyed by Find/SVP reckoned that they had first started using the Net only in the past year. O'Reilly and Associates, a Californian publisher of computer books, excluded Americans accessing the Internet via online services like Compuserve, and got a Net population of only about 6 million in July 1995.
Britain lags not far behind the United States in Internet usage. While about 8% of American adults are on the Net, a survey of 13,000 Britons _ conducted by market researchers NOP in August 1995 _ found that about 5% of adults, or 2.4 million people, had used the Internet either directly or via an online service. Though few statistically accurate surveys are available for the rest of the world, in May 1996 International Data Corporation estimated the total global population of the Net at 24 million; the Matrix study by Texas Internet Consulting similarly estimated the global population of the Net to be 26 million at the end of 1995.
Young, white and affluent
So who are these people on the Net? Well, those in Britain look remarkably similar to those in America _ and they all look remarkably white, middle-class and well-educated, and not as male as you might think. On both sides of the Atlantic, the average age of Internet users is just over 30. (Various studies put it between 30 and 34.) About one-third of Internet users are women, and the percentage of women on both sides of the Atlantic is increasing.Levels of education are high; Nielsen found that two-thirds of American Net users had at least a university degree, versus a fifth of the population at large. And so are levels of income; estimates of the average household incomes of American Internet users cluster around US$50,000 to $60,000 (ú32,000 to ú39,000) a year, well above the national average. Over half, according to Nielsen, are in managerial or professional jobs. In Britain, NOP's survey indicates that over 35% of Internet users have incomes of over ú25,000 a year, also well above the corresponding national figure.
One of the most intriguing indicators of the social composition of British Internet users is the correlation between Net usage and newspaper readership. Readers of the Financial Times are most likely to have used the Net. According to NOP, one in five FT readers have spent time online. Next comes The Daily Mail, 16% of whose readers are on the Net, followed by The Guardian (11%) and The Times (10%). Statistics for the rest of Europe are harder to come by. But a survey conducted over the Web itself by the Graphics, Visualisation and Usability Centre (GVU), part of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, suggests that continental Internet users are somewhat younger, poorer and more student-like than their English-speaking counterparts _ although that result may say as much about Europeans who choose to fill out an English-language form on the Web as Europeans who use the Web overall.
Businesses are leading the growth of the Net: Netscape claims that about 90% of Fortune 1000 companies have invested in an intranet _ and, typically, access to the broader Internet follows hot on the heels of setting up these internal databases and services, which use Internet technology.
But, surprisingly, home has become the most popular place from which to surf. Fully 62% of the Americans surveyed by Nielsen access the Net from home, versus 54% from work and 30% from school. Find/SVP, despite a tighter definition of what it means to be on the Net, found an even higher share of people accessing the Net from home.
Growing home use is creating a Net increasingly sympathetic to entertainment and shopping. But it also means slower access. According to the GVU survey, 28.8k modems have at last overtaken 14.4k modems as the most popular way of accessing the Net. Together, though, 28.8k and 14.4k modems account for about two-thirds (or upwards, according to some studies) of total Net access, the rest consisting of ISDN or leased lines.
Surf for surf's sake
For most Internet users, Web surfing is still an end in itself. According to GVU, nearly four-fifths browse for browsing's sake. About two-thirds also use the Web for entertainment, and half use the Net in their work (both for communication and business-related research). Over half of Web surfers say that Web browsing is replacing some television watching.But, frustratingly for those who hope to make fortunes from entertaining mouse-happy browsers, fully two-thirds of those surveyed by GVU said that they would not want to pay for access to a Web site. (Can anyone say, "advertiser-supported business model"?) Shopping so far comes a poor fourth on the list of things to do on the Web. Only about 14% of those surveyed by GVU listed buying things as something to do from the screen _ although that is a big increase over the 10% who said they shopped on-screen in 1995. And, given the size of the Net's population, even a small percentage of shoppers can add up to a big market: Hoffman and Novak calculate that 1.5 million Americans made a purchase on the Net last year.
Predictably, favourite buys include software, computers and electronics. But two other items creeping up the list of hot Net-sellers are travel and financial services. According to ActivMedia, which surveyed 250 of the Web merchants listed with Yahoo!, Net sales totalled about $436 million (ú273 million) in 1995.
Most Web merchants were small businesses, earning between $10,000 and $60,000 (UKP5,500 to UKP40,000) a month. But half of Net sales went to a handful of large merchants earning over $100,000 a month.
When not shopping or surfing, Netizens also interest themselves in politics; over 90% of those responding to GVU surveys are registered to vote. And perhaps surprisingly, most belong to mainstream political parties and describe themselves as "moderates". This provides an interesting contrast: in the US, most of that minority describing itself as radical seems to come from the right of the political spectrum, while Net radicals in Europe tend to the left.
It's inevitable really, the suburbanisation of the Net - both statistically and socially. Things revert to the mean. And, in the developed world, the mean is middle-class. But a bourgeois Net is not any the less revolutionary. On the contrary, as more people get online, the more the momentum of economic and political change accelerates.
John Browning (jb@wired.co.uk) is executive editor of Wired.
Who says the Net's a fad?
Computers on the Internet
Date Computers '96 January 9,472,000 '95 July 6,642,000 '95 January 4,852,000 '94 October 3,864,000 '94 July 3,212,000 '94 January 2,217,000 '93 October 2,056,000 '93 July 1,776,000 '93 April 1,486,000 '93 January 1,313,000
Source: Network Wizards (www.nw.com/)
The Internet as a Cybersuburb
Source: Consumer Surveys, Lifestyle Focus (1996)
How much Britain's Internet population differs, in percentage terms, from its overall population in work, wages, reading and hobbies.
works.
company directors + 464% housewives - 59% managers + 139% manual workers - 68% professionals + 146% public servants - 23% students + 98% unemployed - 49%
wages
over UKP 40,000 a year + 313% UKP 30,000 - UKP 39,999 a year + 102% UKP 15,000 - UKP 19,999 a year - 36% UKP 10,000 - UKP 14,999 a year - 55%
reading
The European + 488% The Financial Times + 294% The Independent + 181% The News of the World - 39% The Sunday Sport - 36%
hobbies
betting - 26% the lottery + 29% catalogue shopping - 39% cinema + 30% gardening - 34% investing + 49% visiting pubs - 8% wine + 27%