THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507150347
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN LYNCH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
Hey you. Yeah, the wirehead with the laptop. Drop this paper now.
Not that we don't appreciate the readership, but you won't like what you read. See, there are a lot fewer of you than the media and electronics companies let on - as a matter of fact, you may be only 4 percent to 8 percent of the population of the United States.
Despite the legislative attention, the books, the articles and the hype, you're a blip in the census. More people visit Disneyland than surf the Internet. More citizens have asthma than jump around the World Wide Web. If the buyers of John Grisham's latest book challenged plugged-in America to a fistfight, those left standing would be holding bloody copies of ``The Rainmaker.''
And you advertisers and entrepreneurs, you better toss this article, too. Because hits (a measure of visits to World Wide Web sites) grossly exaggerate the number of users really out on the Internet - and those people probably aren't your target audience anyway.
Listen to Rick Spence, industry analyst for Dataquest Inc. in San Jose, Calif. According to Spence, 30 million people worldwide can exchange e-mail.
That's worldwide, but even if we applied that entire number just to the United States, that's only a little more than 11 percent of the population. And this is the number of people who exchange any sort of e-mail, including estimates of internal corporate systems.
``They're really not on the Internet; they're just using it as a vehicle to send information,'' Spence says.
A subset of that - about 14 million - can use file transfer protocol and other Internet functions. And a subset of that number - about 7 million - can use the World Wide Web. So when Netscape Communications Corp. says it received 30 million hits (which measures visits, not visitors) in one week in May, only 7 million people, Spence says, could have clicked there.
This is the good news.
The bad news, says Clifford Stoll, author of ``Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway,'' is that those estimates are probably inflated.
Spence says the 30 million number is gleaned from commercial service figures (which claim about 9 million customers combined), corporations and ``rough estimates.'' But these estimates have to guesstimate around corporate firewalls and don't take into account multiple accounts owned by one user, Stoll says.
``The answer is, literally no one knows,'' he says.
``Do you count the person who has an introductory account as connected? Do you count the guy who spends 10 hours a day on a bulletin board and not the Internet? The real way to count is to have a survey on the street - the same way you ask how many people smoke cigarettes.''
Yet no one has done a comprehensive, face-to-face survey, instead relying on computer estimates and wire traffic, which can grossly misrepresent the medium.
Take the World Wide Web, for instance. The only method to check usership now is hits, which won't reveal repeat customers or who those customers are (it doesn't even distinguish between actual viewers or Web ``spiders,'' automated search programs that could set off a hit).
``There is an audience, but it is much smaller, and they are browsers,'' Stoll says. ``The medium has no impact on them. It lacks a commitment by the user, even less than television.
``I think the computer community is, as usual, overpromised and underdelivered.''
So how many people are really on line? Anywhere from 10 million to 30 million, and it's hard to say what they're doing there. Spence says that number is ``modestly increasing.''
KEYWORDS: PERSONAL COMPUTERS INTERNET STATISTICS by CNB