ABSTRACT
The universe establishes the potential reach of any particular Web site, the same way as statistics about television are determined by their virtual saturation of every household in many countries. On a basic comparison, Web advertising is working with a much smaller universe and a much more dispersed universe and on this basis is less attractive to advertisers. However, the statistics are more nuanced. The universe becomes much more focused when the statistic divides the users into the ‘active’ Internet and the wider user statistic. For instance, Nielsen assesses that in a week in January 2002 there was an active Internet user base of 104.8 million in the United States and a further 41 million at work. It then goes on to assess three other significant statistics: the time per month that a user is on the Web, the average length of time spent on any page and the gender of the user. The average length of use varies considerably from country to country and is primarily determined by local phone rates and secondarily determined by the relative average wealth of each country’s populace as we can see from Table 6.2.
