Internet Stats and Social Marketing

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
- Twain attributed this to B. Disraeli

There may be some who would ask “What does the Internet Stats for dial-up and broadband have to do with Social Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking and Internet Marketing in general?”.  This article will hopefully help direct people into thinking of the importance of the internet statistics and/or help them realize the pitfalls of these statistics.

My Internet Stats

My Internet Stats are a compilation of estimates and solid figures, which I find on the net.  I do not promote these stats as being 100% accurate or the only possible analysis of the figures, but I do promote the idea that we have to make the attempt to find the best set of common figures and give an honest overview of what those figures mean.  It does as little good to lie to ourselves, as it does to allow others to lie to us.

Internet Usage Chart

I created the following chart from a number of sources, but it is primarily based upon the IWS chart for Broadband Usage:

The first thing to note is that the information on the chart is geared for 2007, that is because the broadband information, on the IWS site, is from November of 2007.  All the data used is either from 2007, or from January 1, 2008.  This is done in the attempt to keep all the figures used with-in the same time frame.

Explanation of Terms and Titles

At the top of the columns you will see the titles for those columns, along the side are the countries or regions of the world which I have chosen to use.

Country or Region Name: The area of concern.
ID: The Country or Region Identifier.
Population: The total population of the region or country.
Internet Users: The total number of internet users for that area.
Internet Penetration:  The percentage derived by taking the number of Internet Users and dividing it by the Population figure.
Broadband Subscribers: The number of people using broadband.
Broadband Penetration:  The percentage derived from taking the number of broadband subscribers and dividing it by the population figure.

Adjusted Internet Stats

If you bothered to check the chart out, you will see that the penetration values don’t always show true. This is due the original chart not having Population figures. I went and found the figures for 2007.  In the following chart I adjusted the Penetration rates.

ISP Planet Chart for US Internet Subscribers (2008)

One more chart I will utilize is from the ISP Planet website.  This chart shows a list of ISPs in the US for the January to March of 2008 time frame.  The usefulness of this chart is to give us an indicator of how many Internet Subscribers there were in late 2007.  We can’t get an exact number, but we do know that internet subscriptions rose from November of 2007 to March of 2008.… we just don’t know how much.

What The Charts Reveal!

We can glean bits of information from these charts some of them are:

1. Approximately 98 Million Internet Subscribers in the US during the 1st quarter of 2008 2. An estimated 215,000,000 to 218,000,000 Internet Users were online in Nov of 2007.
3. Approximately 66.2 Million subscribed to Broadband in November of 2007.
4. Approximately 22% of the US Population were broadband subscribers in Nov. 2007.
5. Approximately 71.4% of the US Population were Internet Users in November 2007.
6. The top 12 ISPs made up about 76.7% of all US Internet Subscribers.
7. The ISP Planet chart is made up of both Broadband Subscribers and Dial-up.

The Troubles with Tallies

Stats are like Polls, the data and analysis contained in them can be chosen to support a predetermined outcome or they can be done honestly in order to assist us.

When you look at the IWS site, they state “Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, by the International Telecommunications Union, by local NIC, and other reliable source”  In reality this doesn’t tell me a thing about how the stats are figured, it only tells me where they get some of their information.

So I went to the Nielsen Site to find out how they obtained their figures, they said:

“Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, delivers comprehensive, independent measurement and analysis of online audiences, advertising, video, consumer-generated media, word of mouth, commerce and consumer behavior, and includes products previously marketed under the Nielsen//NetRatings and Nielsen BuzzMetrics brands.”

As the Church Lady would have said, “ Isn’t that special!”. This is a lot like a Gilbert and Sullivan play to me, it’s full of words and music which signify nothing. In other words one can get the impression that Nielsen gathers information from a variety of places, including word of mouth, and toss it into a set of stats whenever possible.  That’s not very professional in my book and Nielsen is one of the better one’s to give stats, imagine what the others are doing?

They don’t answer key factors like:

How do these stats differentiate between my neighbor is using my computer instead of me?

How do these stats show me using internet cafes, the library, or places like Borders and  Starbuck’s?

How do these stats know that I am not on two computers in my home at the same time, instead of there being two separate users?

There are a ton of queries one can make, which are questions of merit based upon real happenings that occur fairly often across the net.

I can remember a discussion I had with a group of people, including a person who claimed to work for the system we were discussing, over a comment I made concerning everyone one the system having two accounts on the average.  I stated that even if a member really only had one account, someone else had 3 or more accounts which would make the comments I made basically true.  There were shouts of outrage by people insisting they only had one account on the system, until I got talking to them and they finally said things like “Well I do have this other account, but I no longer have the password (or I don’t use it)”.  I would then say “It doesn’t matter whether you use the accounts, you still have two accounts (or more) and those accounts are being tallied in the totals for the system.”   Finally many would get the point that the system really didn’t have 140 Million users, if it had 70 Million individual users then they were lucky and odds are they only had between 10 and 40 Million.  Quite the difference, isn’t it?

Well this holds true for internet stats too.  If I work for a place and get on the net through their ISP, then I go home and get on with my ISP… I could be counted as two internet users.  And what of the case where someone is reduced to using Free ISPs?  Netzero still claims they give you 10 free hours a month, although I can’t find out how to get that free ISP service and haven’t really looked very hard.  The point is if they do, I can easily create 4 or more accounts to cover my internet needs and that would have the effect of my being counted 4 or more times… at least in theory.

All this, and more, is cause to suspect the 215 Million Internet Users figures as being erroneous, and by these places calling these “estimates” supports the erroneous Internet Users idea.  The question now is how much is that 215 million reduced by?  Is it 10%, 50%, higher??  We simply don’t know, but with a better way of figuring these stats, we could get a final estimate that is a lot closer to the fact.

Some Factors To Consider

Let’s approach this from another angle, shall we?  According to Wikipedia the age structure of the US Population in 2007 looked like this:

0–19 years: 27.4% (male 42,667,761; female 40,328,895)
20–64 years: 60.1% (male 89,881,041; female 90,813,578)
65 years and over: 12.6% (male 15,858,477; female 21,991,195)

The CIA World Factbook is a great source of information about countries. Even though I have had people produce evidence showing that they do make errors, they provide us with some figures that are most probably in the ballpark.  These are their facts for the Age Structure of the US Population in early 2008:

0-14 years: 20.1% (male 31,257,108/female 29,889,645)
15-64 years: 67.1% (male 101,825,901/female 102,161,823)
65 years and over: 12.7% (male 16,263,255/female 22,426,914) (2008 est.)

I analyzed these figures and came up with this set of figures, once again it might not be 100%, but it’s most likely in the ballpark:

0-14 years:      20.1%
15-19 years:      7.2%
20 - 64 years   60.1%
65 and older:   12.6%

Now, there was an estimated 301,139,947 people in the US in January of 2007. Using the chart I made, we can break down the US Population for 2007 as follows:  .:

0-14:      60,529,129
15-19:    21,682,076
20-64:  180,985,108
65 +:      37,943,634

Now bear in mind that these figures are only for the purpose of helping us to judge whether the figures we are told by the experts are anywhere close to the mark or way out of line.. The bottom like is that there were approximately 240 Million people in the US in November of 2007 who were of the age to be considered as Internet Users.  The number of 215 Million is a workable number and doesn’t fall outside of the realm of possibility. However the downside is that these experts are trying to tell me that around 90% of all those in the US who could be on the net, are on the net. I find that hard to believe, even though I firmly believe that the vast majority of those in the US do things that would classify them as Internet Users. I just don’t think it’s that high of a figure is all.

The Internet Marketing Connection

According to About.com, “Internet Marketing is an all-inclusive term for marketing products and/or services online – and like many all-inclusive terms, Internet marketing means different things to different people“.  One can say that Social Networking, Social Marketing and Social Media Marketing could all be a part of Internet Marketing.  In all cases those running such sites and businesses are “selling” something and it doesn’t matter if what they are selling is their forums and groups or an E-book or a program.  These stats can give us an indication of how many people are out there that we want to reach, in other words it may help us to figure out how many are in our target audience.  We also need other stats, such as ones which will help us choose how many out of the whole may be interested in our products or services.

Another thing the stats do is tell us information to help design our sites.  As marketers of any sort, we don’t want to shut out anywhere from 40% to 70% of the people just because we ignore the narrowband users by designing sites which their internet connections are not fast enough to have them navigate properly.  Even 20% of the potential market is too many to ignore.

Synopsis

We shouldn’t follow stats blindly, accepting whatever we are told simply because we figure those telling us should know.  In many cases they are simply number crunching and only a portion of what they say are backed by hard facts.  Estimates are useful tools, but the estimates should be based on solid numbers which can be shown and followed easily.

There needs to be a better system in place that will give us more accurate stats on the net, especially where broadband usage and dial up are concerned.  One article I have read made it a point to say that a figure they used was so high because of such things as stolen wi-fi. I am not fond of stats like these because they include a lot of conjecture on someone’s part that is virtually unprovable.  I want hard facts, I believe in the “Gravy Theory” which states “Give me the meat and potatoes which are supported by undisputed fact, I’ll accept any increases in numbers as pure gravy.”  I don’t want the numbers from places like internet cafes, Borders Books, Starbuck’s and stolen wireless… I want what can be proven in a court of law and I’ll adjust to everything else.

I am an individual.  I am not being paid by dial-up or broadband companies to promote their products.  I don’t have a agenda for promoting Broadband or Dial-up because it’s cool, far out and funky. The only thing I have to promote is common sense and the idea of “No Internet User Left Behind!”.  As an internet marketer I really can’t afford to toss aside potential customers or clients because I want to base my whole internet ad campaign upon the notion that Dial-up is dead.  That isn’t smart business sense because it doesn’t take much effort or foresight to include those narrowband users.

Sources:

Internet World Stats
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Internet World Stats - Broadband
http://www.internetworldstats.com/list2.htm

Population 2007
http://www.photius.com/rankings/population/population_2007_0.html

Broadband Penetration Grows to 57% in US Homes
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0804/

The World Bank
http://rru.worldbank.org/

2008 ITIF Broadband Rankings
http://www.itif.org/files/2008BBRankings.pdf

Top 25 U.S. ISPs by Subscriber: Q4 2007
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html

Wikipedia:  World Population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

The World Factbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html

Tax Prof Blog
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/02/median-us-gross.html

Briefs: U.S. broadband usage up 28 percent in year
http://www.physorg.com/news11757.html

U.S. broadband use up, says CEA
http://www.901am.com/2007/us-broadband-use-up-says-ce-trade-group.html

Internet Marketing
http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/g/internetmarket.htm

Wikipedia: Demographics of the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

CIA World Factbook: United States
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html

Wikipedia: Household Income in the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Declines,
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/010583.html