Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dustin who wrote (17290)	5/16/1999 7:19:00 PM
From: Craig A	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

From the Bull Market Report: ARTICLE: US Internet Use Still Rocketing By Craig Menefee, Newsbytes. PC sales through traditional channels may be slumping, but measures of Internet usage in the US continued to rise in the hefty double digits, according to the latest survey released by Mediamark Research Inc (MRI). Figures from firm's "Spring 1999 Cyber Stats" report show that 64.2 million US adults, or 32.5 percent of the adult population, said they used the Internet in the 30 days prior to their interview. That compares to 43.6 million or 22.3 percent in the spring, 1998 report - a rise of more than 47 percent in a year. MRI is considered very accurate because of the unusual way in which the firm gathers its numbers. MRI's survey takers actually conduct in-home interviews of people who are willing to talk about what they read and, since 1995, whether they use the Internet. The total sample interviewed is around 25,000 people over the course of the survey time frame - in the case of the current report, March, 1998 through February, 1999. The survey is limited to the US and all respondents must be adults. MRI spokesman Steve Ellwanger told Newsbytes one thing that stood out to the researchers is that use of online services is going up, not down as some had predicted. The prediction was based on the notion that people would begin their online experience by turning to a provider like AOL, MSN, CompuServe or Prodigy, but would leave those services once they were accustomed to browsing the World Wide Web. In other words, the online services were seen by some as being a sort of training ground for Internet "newbies." Ellwanger say that instead of shrinking, the online service audience has continued to grow dramatically. "Use of online services increased even faster than Internet usage," Ellwanger commented. "It was up by 21.2 percent, from 43.8 million last November to 53.1 million in the spring report. In terms of people who said they had used AOL within a 30-day period rose from 23.3 million last fall to 28.6 million in the spring." Ellwanger acknowledged the figure is considerably higher than AOL's current claimed subscriber base, which he put at 17 to 18 million. "From an advertising standpoint, if you look at their total audience, you have the online equivalent of magazine pass-along copies. Online, you have multi-user accounts, people who go online using a friend's PC and so on. So the real audience at AOL - the actual pairs of eyeballs AOL now delivers - is pushing 29 million. I'm sure that will please them on the advertising side of the business." MSN, in second place, rose from 6.2 million last fall to 8.0 million in the spring report, an increase of nearly 30 percent. CompuServe last fall showed 1.7 million users in the MRI survey, a number that increased 17.6 percent to 2.0 million in the new report. Prodigy was barely behind CompuServe, showing an increase of 1.7 million users to 1.9 million users in a difference caused mostly, said Ellwanger, by rounding. "There's one other dramatic difference over the last few years," Ellwanger told Newsbytes. "It's the break-out by gender." In 1995, when MRI began watching Internet usage, the users were, he said, "predominantly male." He continued, "In the fall of 1996, we're talking about 23.5 million users of which 59.4 percent were male and 40.6 were female. That has changed dramatically. Men now are at 51.4 percent, to 48.6 percent women. Since MRI started tracking this, that's got to be one of the biggest changes." He added, "The use at home versus at work has also changed since then. Back in the fall of '96, 12.5 million out of the 23.5 million people on the net used it at home and 11.2 used it at work. Now we've got home at 44.9 million and work 31.1 million." MRI has a Web site at mediamark.com. The article can be found at: asia.yahoo.com ===================================================================== -------------------------------------------------------

To: Dustin who wrote (17290)	5/16/1999 8:09:00 PM
From: Augustus Gloop	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

A NYSE stock has no MM they have specialists.