eMarketer just published some new stats on internet usage in the US that I thought would be interesting to share. What I found intriguing is the comparison to other firms who had published Internet usage stats this year. Who’s right? From the eMarketer study it is estimated that 63.4% of the US population uses the Web at least once per month, and that nearly seven out of 10 Americans will do so by 2013.

However since January, several companies have published their own projections of Internet users and the difference are pretty significant with estimates ranging from 164 million by Nielsen Online to 217 million by J.P. Morgan. So who’s correct?

The differences are directly attributable to methodologies and definitions used. It looks like eMarketer defines an Internet user as “any person who accesses the Internet from any location—home, work, school, a wireless hot spot, etc.—at least once per month. That is, a minimum of 12 times per year.” And to back up their numbers they did an “apples-to-apples comparison” calculating adult Internet users, 18 and older, and compared that with the data provided by comScore and Nielsen. Both firms’ figures are for August 2008. This yielded the following:

Although, the comScore and eMarketer data is much closer the Nielsen data it is still a significant difference of over 23M users. But it does seem that a couple of million new users are being added each year. It would be interesting to have data that reveals time spent online (maybe a PEW report) which is also treading up. I wonder if we will see a big lift/increase in time spent online due to the changing economic situation. More folks at home, looking for jobs online, checking their 401K balances, “stay-cations”, and further utilization of social media applications and communities. Look for more on this topic as I un-earth data.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies