Connected, PC-Enabled Homes On The Rise

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August 19, 1999 (2:30 PM EDT)

By Mo Krochmal,

The number of American homes with computers connected to the Internet is growing, and the gap between PC homes and those connected to the Internet is shrinking, market researchers said Thursday.

According to a survey conducted during the first half of 1999 by Jupiter Communications, a New York researcher, and NFO Interactive, a Greenwich, Conn., pollster, 40 percent of American homes are connected to the Internet, while 55 percent of U.S. households have computers.In 1998, 38 percent of U.S. homes had Internet access and 45 percent had PCs.

Sixty million American homes will be online by 2003 and the gap between hardware and hard-wire will be insignificant, said Evan Cohen, director of data research at Jupiter.

Other findings were Internet users are almost evenly divided between men and women -- females make up 47 percent -- and the audience has an average household income of $64,000.

E-mail, e-greetings, and instant messages are the leading communication tools used while on the Net. Information searching ranked second to communications for uses of the Net, while entertainment was a distant third, said Charles Hamlin, president of NFO Interactive.

Hamlin said there is an age division in Net usage. Adults are focusing on information/research-related tasks, while youths are focused on fun and entertainment, a skew that may change the nature of the medium in 10 to 20 years when this generation of users becomes the mass audience.

People are spending an average of seven hours a week online, led by senior citizens who average eight hours a week online. The growth in online usage comes at the expense of television, Cohen said.

"This is a clarion call for TV advertisers and programmers to follow their audience online," he said.

Once there, they may then go back to the physical world, too. Cohen said Internet users' shopping behavior is affected by online advertising or websites, with 70 percent of the 30,000 people surveyed saying their shopping behavior was affected in terms of price (70 percent), brand (50 percent), model (30 percent), and location (30 percent).

"The message here to marketers is to look online to influence the marketplace," Hamlin said.

For the sellers of advertising, the numbers help secure package sales involving online and offline products, said Jennifer Schreiber, a research manager at J. Walter Thompson, a Chicago-based advertising agency.

"Clients want the numbers first," Schreiber said. "They won't just say, 'Throw 50 percent of the budget online,' until they get the numbers. This is an accountable medium."