Who's on the Net?

Over the next few weeks, the class is going to produce some blogzines in groups. To prepare for this, it seemed logical to do a bit of audience research to find out who really uses the net, and who would be ideal to target our proposed blogzines at.

At time of writing, Internet World Stats claimed that there are approx. 1,093 million internet users, which is 16.6% of the world's population. So, like expected, there's a fair few people out there who we could target with our blogzine. And the number it going to continue to grow. The graph below shows just how rapid user numbers have grown over the past decade. To refine our search, it would be of use to look at net usage within the UK only, and record certain trends to consider when launching the blogzine.


Looking at the government statistics website, I found that the typical user spends 164 mins online per day, compared to 148 mins watching TV. The biggest growth area in net users is within the 16-24 year olds, growing 24% in the last 4 years. People of this age were found to use the internet mostly for social networking, and sports & entertainment news.

In general, it emerged that 65% of men and 55% of women in the UK accessed the internet in 2006., with the majority using it everyday. When it came to looking at interntet shopping, 53% of men purchased goods and services on the net (leisure, accomodation, holidays) as opposed to 48% of women.

Looking at online sales of DVDs, CDs etc, 45% of men bought these online, compared to 39% of women. Lastly, analysing online clothing sales, the majority this time was with women, with 42% of women using the net, compared to 34% of men.

A short but sweet analysis of internet usage, I'm left with a lot of numbers and a lot of percentages.From this though, it would seem that both genders would be equally reachable, a fact that has only emerged over the past few years.