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CyberStats

This resource is a comprensive guide to internet-related statistics and sources. The good news is that because the internet uses computers statistics are rather abundant. The bad news is that the abudance of statistics is surpassed only by the difficulty in figuring out what if anything all the numbers are supposed to mean.

General Statistics

Yahoo maintains a jump-page of sources of internet statistics and demographics.
Internet Index is an occasional collection of facts and statistics about the Internet and related activities edited by Win Treese @ OpenMarket.
Nua Internet Surveys Database provides access to the most interesting and/or important surveys, including Internet Profile In Graphs And Charts and subscription to FREE Nua Internet Surveys weekly newsletter, a weekly digest from Irish research company Nua Ltd. of any and all reports analysing the state of the medium.
CyberAtlas is an extremely extensive compilation of net-related satistics and surveys. The site was listed as one of PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites. The site provides a compilation of the most interesting and/or important surveys, user profiles, software trends, and just about everything else under the sun that you might be looking for.

How Many People are Online

Out of approximately 100 million American households, almost all currently have access to broadcast television, and about 60 million households have cable television. By the end of this decade, the number of households with home computers may surpass the number with cable television. An increasing proportion of these home computers will be equipped with modems, enabling home computers to connect with computers elsewhere, including the internet. And most of the households with this technical capability are likely to connect to some type of online service, including proprietary services such as America On-Line, Compuserve or the Microsoft Network.

There is considerable uncertainty concerning current and future patterns of home computing. Even the current number of home computers is in doubt. With other consumer durables such as automobiles or microwave ovens, where possession and use are synonymous. But many households have older -- unused or unusable -- computers in the house, complicating estimates of the current installed base. It is generally estimated that approximately 30 million US households have home computers, and about 10-15 million have modems which enable them to go online. According to various forecasts, between 40 million to 70 million households will have home computers by the end of the decade, and somewhere between 30 million and 60 million will have modems for online access. The number of households with access to internet services such as the World Wide Web is estimated to grow to somewhere between 20 million and 45 million by the end of this decade.

How Large is the Internet

Matrix Information and Directory Services has published three Internet Demographic Surveys which estimate the demographics of the Internet, by surveying organizations connected to the Internet. The most recent survey was completed in October 1995. MIDS also publishes the regular [and more recent] Matrix Maps Quarterly (MMQ) with color maps of computer networks and tables, graphs, figures, and text showing network sizes and locations, in hosts, servers, users, and other units, correlated by population, personal income, and other factors.
Internet Domain Survey Number of Hosts and Domains - survey data by Network Wizards.
Internet Statistics Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet host-stats from Matthew Gray of the Massachussets Institute of Technology
Internet Trends [mainly hosts and domain stuff] slide from Tony Rutkowski and General Magic
The Graphics, Visualization, & Usability [GVU] Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing NSFNET Backbone Statistics Page includes coverage up to April 1995, when the NSFNET Backbone Service transitioned to a new Network Access Point architecture, ending collection of this data. World Wide Web traffic surpassed gopher in volume of traffic on the internet by the end of 1995. Based on these trends, WWW was projected to surpass FTP as the dominant source of traffic on the internet by the end of 1995.

World Wide Web - Users

The Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech has conducted seven surveys of WWW usage, and the Eighth WWW User Survey is in progress with results available around 01 December 1997. Since the Web continually grows and changes in nature, GVU have decided to conduct the WWW User Surveys at periodic intervals (every 6 months). Surveys are a public service effort. All results are made free to the public as well as access to the collected datasets, though certain restrictions do apply. The GVU Center is a research center affiliated with Georgia Tech's College of Computing (COC). The surveys review the socio-demographic profile of users, as well as discussions on data privacy, WWW usage and preferences, Web authors and perceptions of Java.
O'Reilly & Associates has conducted what it terms the first statistically defensible survey of Internet users Defining the Internet Opportunity 1994-1995. The survey, which profiled Internet users by age, concluded that over half of Internet users had household incomes of less than $50,000, with women accounting for over one-third of users.
Survey-Net is a source for user demographics on the Internet through self-selected participation in online surveys.
CyberStats offers online polling, but there is no sample control and only a few folks are voting.

Usenet and E-Mail Listservs

As with many aspects of the internet, statistics on users of Usenet are uncertain.

The total number of computers hosting Usenet news continues to grow rapidly, according to MIDS survey data.
The Brian Reid's Revised Usenet Arbitron includes a chart of the history of the number of articles posted to Usenet as well as a chart of the history of the megabytes of traffic posted to Usenet
The Walter Shelby Group at tile.net has a listing of E-Mail LISTSERVs including a ranked listing of the most popular LISTSERVs [those with more than 1,000 subscribers]. This indicates that Usenet newsgroups may have audiences that are between five and fifty times larger than listservs.

Client Hardware Trends

The radical improvements in personal computing have been obscured by the substantial continuity in the external appearance of the desk-top work-station. From the outside, today's station looks much like that of its predecessors -- a keyboard, a box about the size of a small suitcase, and a monitor, all in any color you want as long as it is beige. But these external similarities have masked profound quantitative and qualitative internal improvements. Although no single performance benchmark fully captures these developments, the speed and performance of today's desktop computers are anywhere from 100 to 100,000 times that of personal computers of fifteen years ago.

During the 1980s, annual sales of desktop computers for office use grew at a rate of about 10% each year, from five million units to ten million units. And in the early 1990s, annual sales increased dramatically, with home computer sales growing at 20% annually. Total sales surpassed twenty million units in the mid-90s, and are expected to approach forty million units by the end of the decade [according to a study by the consulting firm Dataquest], most of which will be platforms more sophisticated than today's Pentium [according to projections by BIS Strategic Decisions]. Our analysis is a composite of the projections provided by these two firms.

The current boom in computers sales derives from a convergence of office and home computing capabilities. A decade ago, the computer market was fundamentally divided between office computers costing anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000, and much less capable home computers typically costing between $1,000 and $2,000 [in 1995 equivalent dollars, adjusted for inflation]. While desk-top computers brought powerful new capabilities to the office, home users were relegated to playing simple games, typing short letters, and storing recipes. Today, both home and office users have converged on highly-capable systems typically costing about $3,000. The profound expansion in the range of capabilities of home computers accounts for the greatly expanded ownership of these systems, as both home and office systems provide equivalent applications.

[computers] Installed Base of Computers In 1995 only a small fraction of installed desktop computers were fully capable of supporting sophisticated 32-bit multi-tasking applications, which require Pentium/PowerPC platforms. However, as a result of greatly increased annual sales levels, by the end of this decade most installed computers will support such applications, as well as more advanced implementations which have yet to be identified. These projections are based on our composite analysis of forecast sales, and are consistent with other estimates of the existing intalled base of computers.

Most of these computers will reside in the homes of individual citizens. By the end of this decade, the aggregate computational power of home computers will rival that of all desk-top office computers in public, private, and non-profit organizations combined.

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Maintained by John Pike
Updated Thursday, October 16, 1997 4:27:53 PM