irthrifty,
Welcome to the "AOL reality page" :-D
Is the 65% of internet access # through AOL accurate?
Excellent question. This would imply there are only 15 million Internet subscribers (US only). Of these, the little blurb you dug up implies AOL provides access for two-thirds, or 10 million, the number of "subscribers" AOL "claims". I don't know if this implies actual number of paying accounts, one per household, or accounts times average persons per household. In any event, this is pure puffery (some call it total BS) at its finest. A cursory 15 minute search of the Web revealed the following:
Here is a link to usage as of 11/25/97, select Demographics and type "uasge":
nua.ie
intelliquest : 56 million adults online in the US Nov 25 1997: Intelliquest have released a report on Internet usage which reveals that 27 percent of the US population over 16 claim to use the Internet and that 4.9 million adults have come online in the last three months. In addition a further 16 million expressed the intention of going online before the year is out.
Here is a source that puts the number of Internet hosts at 19,540,000
nw.com
definition: A host is a domain name that has an IP address (A) record associated with it. This would be any computer system connected to the Internet (via full or part-time, direct or dialup connections). ie. nw.com, www.nw.com
If you remove AOL's host computer, there are only 19,539,999 other host computers!
Here's a similar report showing the growth in host sites graphically:
genmagic.com
Here's an interesting, "irresponsible" worldwide stats generator. Page down to the "number of people on the Internet on this date" area and type in "December 4, 1997":
anamorph.com
There would be 118,983,155 people using the Internet. (This represents 1.98 % of the world's population).
Finally, here's another interesting blurb for all the banner-ad haters out there, third item down:
nua.ie
Sydney Morning Herald : Click Through Rate on Ad Banners is dropping Dec 3 1997: At a conference held in Sydney last week, Dr. Marshall Rose of First Virtual a Californian ecommerce company, revealed that less than 2 percent of banner ads placed on frequently visited sites are clicked on by Internet surfers. Despite the fact that "click-through" is decreasing, marketing on the Internet is still considered a more powerful medium than marketing by traditional means and it has the reputation of getting a better response from viewers. Dr. Marshall Rose projected that low click through was because users objected to being brought off the path of whatever they are reading. He suggested that banner ads were counter intuitive as , "the ads try to force the viewer to abandon the reason why they're at that page."
P.S., irthrifty, if you really are thrifty, you can 5 hours free web access per month from AT&T each and every month if they are your long distance carrier. |
