News
Internet Survey Data Released
- By Scott Bekker
- November 23, 1999
International Data Corp. (IDC,
www.idc.com) has released the results from Project Atlas, the world's largest Web survey to date. In many categories, the findings of the survey were not what the researchers expected to see. All findings of the survey, however, indicate that Internet use is on the rise worldwide.
One such unexpected finding was that a higher percentage of respondents access the Internet from schools in Mexico than in Japan, one of the world's most technically advanced and academically oriented societies.
Project Atlas was conducted in 13 major languages in cooperation with the Web's top portals. More than 28,000 responses were received from more than 80 countries including Argentina, Australia, Colombia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Other key findings of the survey included:
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Purchasing goods and services over the Web has become a worldwide phenomenon, even in less developed countries like China and India, where more than 25 percent of respondents had purchased over the Web from home. The average amount spent on the Web ranged from under $35 in Denmark, Spain and China to over $70 in the United States, Argentina and Puerto Rico.
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The average number of home devices that access the Web is 1.5, but the distribution of multiple-device households is not even. Twenty-six percent of Japanese users have over 3 Internet devices in their homes, versus 13 percent in the United States and only 7 percent in the United Kingdom.
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Average monthly Internet access fees vary greatly by country - from $78 per month in Argentina to $18 per month in Sweden.
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Most survey respondents said they preferred to visit Web sites in their local language, although the degree to which this was so varied considerably. Eighty percent of the respondents in India favored English-language sites, as did almost half the respondents in Hong Kong and the Netherlands.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.