We are going to write a collective paper today that addresses these questions. You will use search engines to find information. Your group will write at least a long paragraph summary of your findings and will cite the sources of your information.
Here are the assignments and responses:
The paragraph of Rebekah, Stephen M., and Claire.
The estimates for the size of the Internet's population range from numbers as voluminous as 22.6 million Internet users [MIDS] to as small and convervative as 9.8 million Internet users [O'Reilly]. The numbers differ so radically because some people have access to just one part of the Internet, for example just the WWW, or just email, etc. Add these populations together with the people who have full Internet access and you will have a larger number. The smaller numbers measure just the people with full Internet access. In either case, most sources disclaim their statistics one way or the other with the reminder that the Internet is too fast-growing and dynamic to truly record with static numbers. We found claims are enormous as "35 million users in 1994, expected to double each year!" [Labryinth Studies, Georgetown University]. But over and over the most authoritative sources give smaller numbers. The American Internet User Survey, the most recent to date, estimates 9.5 million users [FIND/SVP] and we enjoyed the fact that this matched the O'Reilly source, which we felt was the most trustworthy.
Follow up info courtesy of Claire:
(Claire's message to Monica follows)
Hi, sorry to disturb you... on this page you, or someone, says--
INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB
By establishing a presence on the WorldWide Web, your products or services will be
marketed to more than 30 million people on a worldwide network of more than 5 million
computers. The population of the Internet in growing by 15% every month. Your
company does not want to miss out on the opportunity to advertise your products,
convey your company image 24 hours a day, and solicit sales to a worldwide market.
Potential customers of yours are probably browsing the Internet right now. Your
competitors are gearing up for an Internet presence, if they're no already there. It is time
for you to turn potential into reality.
I'm not critical, but curious, where did you get these statistics? We're doing some research for a class here at UT Austin and we're finding a wide variety of estimates. Are these the estimates of the company, or pulled from a magazine article, another website, a book?
Thanks for your time and attention!
Thank you for your interest in Access Corporation's Web Site. I retrieved the statistics for the Internet and World Wide Web page from two different sources. One, of course, is the World Wide Web. I did a search in Yahoo on Internet Demographics and came across a study published every six months from Georgia Tech University (I believe it was them). The second source was a magazine I receive called Internet World. It is an excellent source for information on Internet stats and news about new sites and the Internet in general. Hope this helps! Good luck with your research.
To: (Claire L. Benedikt)
From: Monica Ausburn
Monica Ausburn
Account Executive
The problem is this: there is no absolute way to measure any statistic regarding the growth of the Internet. As John Quarterman of MIDS says:
The Internet is distributed by nature. This is its strongest feature, since no single
entity is in control, and its pieces run themselves, cooperating to form the network
of networks that is the Internet. However, because no single entity is control,
nobody knows everything about the Internet. Measuring it is especially hard
because some parts choose to limit access to themselves to various degrees. So,
instead of measurement, we have various forms of surveying and estimation.
This information came from the following URL:
http://www.anamorph.com/docs/stats/stats.html
Predictions from the Statistics Generator at Anamorph
If the number of people using the Internet were to keep doubling every year, then
On July 31, 2003:
There would be 6,005,829,386 people using the Internet.
(This represents 100.1 % of the world's population).
Predictions from the Statistics Generator at Anamorph
Last Updated: May 10, 1995. Created April 3, 1995.
Copyright 1995 Robert Orenstein. Your Comments are welcome: rlo@netcom.com
The following information comes from
:http://www.netgen.com/info/growth.html
The Web has grown fast. How fast? For the second half of 1993, the Web had a doubling
period of under 3 months, and even today the doubling period is still nearly 5 months.
Additionally, the percentage of Web sites that are commercial has increased dramatically. The
numbers below show the percentage growth in the .com domain, which excludes foreign
commercial sites (such as the .co.uk domain, etc.).
The growth of the Web has been remarkable even compared to the Internet at large, as shown
by the number of hosts per Web server. In June of 1995, even with the phenomenal growth of
the Internet, the number of Web servers soared to a point where one in e very 270 machines on
the Internet is a Web server.
| Results Summary | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month | # of Web sites | % .com sites | Hosts per Web server |
| 6/93 | 130 | 1.5 | 13,000 |
| 12/93 | 623 | 4.6 | 3,475 |
| 6/94 | 2,738 | 13.5 | 1,095 |
| 12/94 | 10,022 | 18.3 | 451 |
| 6/95 | 23,500 | 31.3 | 270 |
| 1/96 | 90,000 | 50.2 | 100 (estimate) |
The above graph came from
:http://www.dgp.utoronto.ca/upcoming/internetconf.html
Cloyce D. Spradling
Johnson Ngo
John Alme
| CONTINENT | HOSTS |
| North America | 4,540,703 |
| South America | 25,577 |
| Europe | 3,111,048 |
| Asia | 292,370 |
| Australia | 252,426 |
Although we found a wealth of information in our search, most dated back at least six months. Therefore we adjusted our figures slightly to accommodate the ever-growing Internet. According to statistics from Network Wizards, there were approximately 6.6 million hosts worldwide in July 1995. Though most growth can be attributed to the recent commercialization of the World Wide Web, (Procter & Gamble is said to have registered several unusual domain names based on ailments, such as diarrhea.com, pimples.com, and underarms.com, etc.), public interest has certainly added to the increasing size of the Internet. Interestingly enough, Europe and North America, (namely the U.S.A. and Canada), account for nearly 93% of hosts worldwide. Even China, which represents a third of the world's population has only 1,023 hosts to itself. Communists aside, the Internet is sure to keep expanding to suit rising interest in freely accessible information.
Sources:
Merit Network Information Center Services from:
ftp://nic.merit.edu/nsfnet/statistics/nets.by.state ftp://nic.merit.edu/nsfnet/statistics/history.hosts ftp://nic.merit.edu/nsfnet/statistics/nets.by.country
Network Wizards from:
http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/dist-bynum.html
Internet Info from:
http://www.webcom.com/~walsh/stats.html
Special thanks to Cloyce D. Spradling for "Search-and-Replace" programming on the fly.
Rudy H., Marco and Annie Herrmann.
The growing rate of internet users is 6.5% per month. Currently there are approximately 35 million users. Approximately 70% of the users are men and 30% women world wide. Country to country the statistics will vary slightly, but men seem to rank much higher than women. These percentages of men to women using the new superhighway is not surprising. Partly due to the dominance of men in the work force, and the fact that half of internet users are professional and technically related women tend to be using in smaller numbers.
Lower income groups are not prevalent on the Web due to limited resources and education. A survey done in 1994 showed that the mid range income families at about $60K a year had the largest amount of users in there income group. The percentages decease quickly on either side of the median. It looks almost like a bell curve starting at under $15K going over $200K. As for race, we were unable to show any data which could give any conclusive information for this study.
http:// delweb.com/statisi.htm/
Doyle, Mary. "Women in the Internet." http:/www.vwo.ca/journ/dowle95a.html(February 1, 1996).
Sam Miller
Dora Zamora
Cecilia Camacho
Stephen Sebesta
There are many commercial services available today, including AOL, CompuServe, MicroSoft Network, CerfNet, NearNet, and many more. Each company has an estimated 2 to 4 million users. That is excluding the 10 million that use the internet alone. The growth of these services has skyrocketed so much that there is talk of the Internet running at near full capacity, given that there are an estimated 25 million users of the internet today. The Net was originally owned and operated by the National Science Foundation which connected a few dozen important scientific sites. Also connected to the backbone were regional access providers. In April 1995 the NSF Decided to turn the Internet business over to the private sector. Now there are almost a dozen rather than a few regional providers, and in addition there are now a few thousand small-time Internet providers.
Works cited:
http://user.aol.com/tdave365/page/column.html
(assignment developed by Lester Faigley)