| UPDATE FROM COMMERCENET / Neilsen Media Research 58 Million People are New Using the Internet Advertsing Directory | Home Page |
| Dec. 1997 --There are now more than 58 million adults using the Internet in
the U.S. and Canada. And more than half of these -- 30 million persons -- were on-line
during the last 24 hours. Worldwide Web users are now measured at 48 million people. Even more important to electronic commerce, the number of people who have actually made purchases on the Worldwide Web has reached almost 10 million. These are among the key figures released today by CommerceNet and Nielsen Media Research. The Fall 1997 CommerceNet/ Nielsen Media Research Internet Demographics Survey is the fourth in a groundbreaking series that has tracked Internet use by people over 16 years of age in North America since 1995. "We are gratified to see growth in the range of 50% for Web Shopping," said Stacey Bressler, CommerceNet’s vice president of marketing. "We expect that as more people use the Web for holiday shopping, the number will rise even more steeply." "The recent rise in Internet shopping directly rewards the industry’s technical and marketing initiatives in the past year to build consumer confidence, " said Jerome Samson, Nielsen Media Research’s director of technology and business strategy. "However, we still have more work to do. Of the 48 million Web users, 54%, were not likely to make on-line purchases in the future." Another inhibiting factor was lack of knowledge. Few of the people surveyed had ever heard about the security offered by SSL (14%) and even fewer (8%) had heard of TRUSTe, the on-line service which licenses trustmarks to sites adhering to informed consent standards. |