And what's true for the US has in the past generally held true for Australia too. The growth in Internet users continues to slow in percentage terms, but that's partly because so much of the potential audience is now online - more than half of all adults in the US and Australia. The Net is becoming a preferred source. As users get used to the Net, they shop more. Now that so many people are online, activity matters far more than raw user numbers.
Online shopping is still small, but booming.
That's still less than two per cent of all retail sales, but it won't be for long at that growth rate. Online favorites include computer hardware and software, travel, and books - more than one in every ten books bought in North America in 2001 was bought online. The Internet is carrying far more data. Internet backbone traffic continues to roughly double every year, a trend that has continued into 2001 according to MIT researcher Andrew Odlyzko. Mere annual doubling of traffic seems almost tardy when measured against some of the reported growth rates of the boom years.