The idea that estimating the amount of users on the internet is basically impossible never seems to stop people trying. The latest to line up is research company RelevantKnowledge Inc, which according to what it grandly calls its latest web universe enumeration it reckons there are now 57.04 million people using the web – note, not the internet as a whole. That’s 1.6 million more than the company’s last survey back in January. The Atlanta-based research company interviewed 10,000 people, including both users and non-users of the web between late February and mid-April and received detailed demographic profiles from 1,440 web users. The company’s methodology goes something like this. Starting with the assumption that every web user has a phone at home (for every one that does not the survey is skewed, admitted the firm), the 10,000 homes are called using random digit dialing. If the home has two phones, then the information is only given half as much weight. The company makes sure an adult is speaking, s/he is asked if anyone in the house has used the web either at work, hone or college in the past 30 days. That gives a straight yes/no percentage of the homes called. Then, using the US census, the company can tell how many homes have phones, from which can be derived a rough estimate of the number of web users. To refine that, the surveyor then asks how many people in the house have used the web and then ask to speak to the person with the most recent birthday to get a detailed demographic of that person. That random approach is designed to avoid a skew towards women users, who, according to the company, are more likely to answer the phone than are men. So by knowing the number of homes with phones that have web users, and then the number of people in each house that uses the web, combined with the size of the population, gives the company its estimate of 57 million. It also tells the company apparently almost 77% of users are between 18 and 49 (presumably children are completely discounted from this); 56% are men; slightly more than half of them have college degrees, more than double the US average.
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