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How popular is the online media

May 15, 2008

The online media experienced it’s real boom in the early 1990′s, shortly after Tim Berners-Lee first developed HTTP—Hypertext Transfer Protocol , the method computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet; designed the URI—Universal Resource Identifier, a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet; created the first web-browser, Tim called his first browser the “WorldWideWeb“; and developed HTML—HyperText Markup Language, the markup language for web-pages. This was a big year for Tim.

Determining how popular the web real is can be a little difficult, but to put it into some perspective let’s consider three metrics:

• the number of website
• the percentage of people accessing the web
• the amount of time being spent on some popular sites

Number of Websites

According to statistics collected by the Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (ISC)—a corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet (their words)—there were well over 500 million websites available in January 2008. The figure below shows these statistics and the remarkable growth over the past decade and a half.

To put this into perspective, the biggest library in the world is arguably the British Library which has about 25 million books. That’s about 10% of the number of websites that are available. It’s little wonder we feel overwhelmed with information when we go onto the Internet.

Percentage of People Accessing the Web

The organization Internet World Stats (www.internetworldstats.com) collects information on population usage patterns and numbers for marketing purposes. In their most recent report (March 2008), the penetration of the Internet has reached about 21% of the world population. That’s a staggering 1.4 Billion people (1,407,724,920). They also report that currently about 73% of North Americans access with Internet, versus only 5% of the African population.

Amount of Time Spent on the Web

With over 500 million websites to choose from it would be very difficult to accurately measure how much total time is spend on the web, so let’s look at some information made available by compete.com (www.compete.com), a web analytics company.

In a survey they performed in December of 2006, compete.com found that the most popular website in the US was www.myspace.com. This site claimed 11.9% of people’s time, or, are you ready for this… a total of 27,999,901,051 minutes were spent at www.myspace.com in one month. Doing the math, this means web-surfers, collectively spent more than 53 thousand years on this site, in a single month.

So how popular is the online media? Well as these simple metrics show, we are spending a staggering amount of time online. And it seems the trend to do so is still increasing.

What this means for us as writers, is that we need to both understand the unique features and challenges of this media, and develop writing skills that are suitable.