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By Ian Austen
The New York Times, June 29, 2000 

When cartoonists need visual shorthand for the typical American Web user, they usually come up with an unshaved young man surrounded by containers that once held various kinds of salty foods.

But that stereotype does not quite hold true in the United States and other countries where the Web found an early audience. "The Web is becoming as mainstream in some ways as television, CD's, radios and newspapers," said Doug McFarland, senior vice president and general manager at Media Metrix, the Web ratings firm. It is the job of Mr. McFarland and others in the business of tracking users to determine just how ordinary the Web is becoming.

A comparison of numbers from last year and this revealed a few surprises in who was using the Web and how it was being used.

To start with, Web use became balanced between sexes for the first time this year with 31.1 million men and 30.2 million women online in April, according to Media Metrix. In some months this year, Mr. McFarland added, female users have significantly outnumbered their male counterparts. And regardless of how they might think of themselves, the cold statistical reality of typical Web users is that they are no longer young.

"The Web is now, in fact, very middle-aged," Mr. McFarland said. "It tends to be used by people in their mid-40's on average. Not young people who are popping pizza all day."

The fastest growing group among Web users in the last year, in fact, was about as far from the young male stereotype as one can get: women over 55. Their numbers increased by 98.1 percent over 1999, hitting 3.19 million in April, according to Media Metrix. Mr. McFarland said that the rush of older women comes about a year after older men exhibited a similar trend. And while many people might think that every teenager in the country is an old Web hand, they were the group that exhibited the second-highest growth rate over last year in Media Metrix survey, rising just under 80 percent from April 1999's level.

Lost in the rush to use the Web, however, are the nation's poor. "There is still a tremendous digital divide," said Allen Weiner, vice president for analytical services at Nielsen/NetRatings. Jupiter Research figures show a startling gap between the two income extremes. Only 21 percent of households with incomes of less than $15,000 a year have Web access, compared with 78 percent of those with incomes over $75,000, despite the drop in the price of a PC or an Internet connection.

And although the Web is worldwide in name, it remains mostly an American phenomenon. The United States has more Web users than the next 15 countries combined, Mr. McFarland said. But only three of the next six biggest Web-using nations -- Canada, Britain and Australia -- have predominantly English-speaking populations.

People are also spending more time staring at monitors. Nielsen/NetRatings measurements show that adult men, for example, increased their monthly viewing by two hours over last year, spending 10 hours and 44 minutes using the Web on average last month. In what appears to be a carry-over from the divide between the sexes over the use of television remote control, men also view more pages than women when online. Nielsen/NetRatings indicates that men look at, on average, nearly 74 pages an hour, compared with 71 for women.

A more dramatic difference can be found hidden on the favorites or bookmark lists of men and women. Mr. McFarland said that when Media Metrix took a peek it found that the average man had 60 Web pages bookmarked, and the typical woman had 16. "Men are more fickle," he said.

Mr. Weiner added: "What was Jerry Seinfeld's greatest line? Men aren't interested in what's on. They're interested in what else is on."

Two of the biggest items on the Web in the last year were downloadable music -- legal or otherwise -- and shopping. Napster, the Web-based music file searching and sharing service that has become the bane of recording industry, was so small in April 1999 that it did not meet Media Metrix's minimum measurement threshold of 200,000 unique visitors. In April of this year, however, 1.79 million different people visited the site, the company said. Mr. McFarland said the past year also brought growth to Web-based radio, but primitive efforts at television have not been particularly successful.

In shopping, the Boston Consulting Group estimates that North American online consumer purchases -- including the buying of other people's cast-offs through auction services like eBay -- will total $61 billion by the end of 2000. If so, that will be 85 percent more than the group measured during 1999. Online shopping, like the Web itself, is becoming increasingly mainstream, said James Vogtle, e-commerce research director at the Boston Consulting Group, with a steady stream of major retailers like Kmart's Bluelight.com increasing their presence on the Web.

One of the few areas to show a decline was the amount of time people spend online at work. In April, according to Media Metrix, Web users with access only at work spent an average of 10 hours and 19 minutes, 10 minutes less than the year before.

Mr. Weiner said the estrangement between the Web and the office has been caused by employers blocking employees' access to streaming audio and video. EBay and other online auctions, which were once popular work-time Web destinations, are also being cut off. In addition, some companies track sites viewed by employees on the job and the time they spent using them. Office e-mail use, which is excluded from Web-viewing counts, continued to increase.

One major attraction of the office PC is the high-speed connection. Despite all the advertising and media attention given to cable modems and digital subscriber lines, high-speed consumer services were used by only 8.8 percent of American home users last month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. About 55 percent of Web users relied on dial-up 56K modems. For most Americans, Mr. Weiner said, high speed is either too expensive or too fraught with technical difficulties to be attractive.

The next big thing on the Web may have little to do with the medium directly.

Mr. McFarland said that a major news event (bigger even than a Victoria's Secret fashion show) could erase any doubts about the Web's legitimacy. Perhaps that will happen this year with the presidential campaigns and the Summer Olympics occurring at a time of widespread Internet use.

If large numbers of people use the Web to follow those or other major news events, it will confirm, Mr. McFarland said, "that the Internet is becoming more of a part of the fabric of peoples' lives." Until then, the record for generating the most Web traffic will still be held by the release of the report to Congress by Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel.

By one count, 20 million Americans had read parts of the report online within 48 hours of its release.