Net Statistics

Across the world, nearly a billion people regularly use the Internet as of 2005, and that number is growing. In the United States alone, 138 million people actively use the Internet every week, according to Nielsen NetRatings. Nearly every public school in America provides access to the Internet. The broad reach of the Internet is staggering, as is the power of the sites that are capitalizing the most on this vast wealth of popularity.

Nielsen gives an interesting picture of how people are using the Internet. Each week, the average connected American uses the Internet for more than eight hours at home and 19 hours at work, but looks at the average web page for only 51 seconds. Compare that to the number of unique newspaper pages the average person sees per week and you get a picture of the great diversity of information gained from the Internet.

The basic statistics of the top web companies' reach are impressive. The most popular parent companies online are Microsoft and Time Warner, who reach 57 million and 52 million unique users each week, respectively. MSN.com and AOL.com are the respective powerhouses of each parent company. Time Warner can, in turn, claim the most traffic, as web users spend an average of 90 minutes on its sites, compared to 33 for Microsoft.

Yahoo! also reaches 52 million weekly users, with rival Google slightly behind at 38 million. However, Yahoo! can claim 57 minutes of users' time every week and Google a scant 11 minutes, probably because it is still primarily a search tool, whereas Yahoo! has a number of other services. Other popular online companies are eBay, InterActiveCorp (which includes Match.com and Citysearch), the U.S. government, Real Networks (which includes Real.com), and Disney.