So what we re seeing is a huge burst of growth in the online community. The really big story in 1999, though, was the incredible emergence of e-commerce. Forty-two percent of Internet consumers say they regularly or occasionally make a purchase online, compared to 31 percent in the 1998 study. That s an increase of one-third, which is pretty amazing when we saw usage of most other applications we tested had stayed about the same during the same period of time. The increase was fueled in part by 54 percent more women shopping online this year.
Men are still a majority, but women are becoming more and more of a force in the e-commerce world.
While the population is definitely moving more mainstream, it s still very much what we call the upscale mass market. Online consumers remain more affluent and better educated than the general population at large. The data make a pretty optimistic case for the future of the online medium. One of the clearest trends is that the longer people have been online from less than a year to one to three years to three years or more the more important the medium becomes to them. Those online more than three years, for example, report spending an average of 10.5 hours per week online, compared to just 6.6 hours for newcomers.