Domestic Demographics

    As of March 05, 1999, seventy-nine million United States citizens now have Internet access, according to a report done by Intelliquest.  The citizens involved in the survey were all over the age of sixteen.  The study also concluded that an additional twenty million people are expected to go on-line within the upcoming year.  This will result in almost or over one hundred million people having Internet access by the year 2000.
     The profile of the typical Internet user is becoming more and more mainstream.  According to a web user profile survey conducted by Estats, the median age of the user is around the age of thirty-eight years old.  Almost sixty-one percent of these users are of the male gender, but the percentage of women using the Internet is growing faster than that of men beginning to go online.  Sixty-four percent of the seventy-nine million users have graduated with a college degree.  The majority of these users are white-collared employees with their careers are in the fields of professional, managerial positions, education, and computer related areas.  Also, another interesting fact shows that forty-two percent of these Americans Internet users are married.
     The Intelliquest study also reported that almost sixty percent of United States Internet users use the Internet for on-line shopping.  One third of these people actually purchase products on-line, with automobiles and computer accessories as the most sought after products by American users.  Yet, the most popular products purchased through the Internet are books.  A large reason for books being the most purchased products on-line is through the company known as Amazon.com.  The status of the average household income for Internet users in the U.S. is in the middle to upper middle class range.  Fifty five percent of the homes surveyed reported an annual income of fifty thousand dollars or more.  This is a slight decrease from what the average percentage was reported as in 1996.  In 1996, sixty percent of the homes reported had an annual income of over fifty thousand or more.  This result showed that more American households could afford to buy computers and thus can afford to go on-line.  This can somewhat be attributed to cheaper Internet access rates and the decreasing cost of computers and their accessories.