Word: nielsen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week, though, the hard data finally arrived. Nielsen Media Research--the folks who do the famous Nielsen TV ratings--unveiled the results of what seems to be the first solid, scientific survey of the Internet, or at least the portion of it that covers the U.S. and Canada. Most earlier surveys relied on figures obtained through questionnaires or by counting the number of Internet host computers and multiplying that by an estimated number of users per host--a fudge factor that is particularly difficult to measure when an Internet host computer can be anything from a single workstation...
...Nielsen survey, by contrast, used the same random phone-calling techniques employed by political pollsters and marketing firms. Commissioned by CommerceNet, an industry consortium looking to boost business online, the study was based on interviews with more than 4,200 North American households--a sample that experts say is large enough to be taken seriously...
...those who had staked their reputations--not to mention their assets--on the assumption that the Internet was a lot bigger than the pessimists said, the news was good. According to Nielsen, approximately 37 million people in the U.S. and Canada have access to the Net--either direct or through a friend, a colleague or a commercial online service like CompuServe, Prodigy or America Online. That's more than the number of TV viewers who tune in to ER each week. Some 24 million people used the Internet during the past three months--a number that represents...
What probably matters more than the size of the Nielsen head count, however, is its solidity. A week earlier, online publisher O'Reilly & Associates rolled out a competing study that counted only U.S. adult users and found that fewer than 10 million have Internet access. But given Nielsen's reputation for sound methodology--and the fact that it told Wall Street what it wanted to hear--the results are likely to be accepted as definitive...
...Nielsen survey also seems likely to spark a boom in further research. Niche marketers will want to slice the study's broad demographic categories (gender, age, income) into ever finer segments--something the Net facilitates by allowing marketers to gather data on its users with every click of a mouse. And companies with more global ambitions will want to extend the polling data beyond North America into the more than 160 other countries that can be reached through the Internet...