Americans are reluctant to part with some old media and some new, but traditional print media don’t fare well. With the proliferation of communications devices and services, it is worth examining the relative strength of preferences among Americans for their gadgets and services. Although the technologies by which people receive and process information may be […]
For most Americans, multiple information services and gadgets are usually nearby. Penetration of devices and services nears or surpasses 60% or more in four of the ten technologies categories we queried. As the table shows, Americans approach or top the 60% mark for the Internet, computer use, cable subscription, and cell phones – a first […]
WASHINGTON (October 22, 2003) — The recent explosion of email spam is beginning to take its toll on the Internet world. A new nationwide survey shows that 25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email […]
A defining characteristic of the changing U.S. household has been the growth in consumption of information goods and services. As the average size of the household has declined in the past century, Americans have increasingly filled their homes with tools to send and receive information, including computers, telephones, and digital videodisc (DVD) players. In the […]
What the survey means to policy makers. We would like to reiterate a few findings in this Internet user survey that directly speak to some of the issues that legislators, regulators, and technologists are tackling in their fight against spam. As these findings particularly stand out with users, we feel that acknowledging them may help […]
Women, parents, young Internet users, and longtime Internet users have particular responses to spam. A few demographic groups display distinctive behaviors or attitudes toward spam: women hate pornography; parents resent the risks spam presents to their children; younger users have a casual response to spam; veterans of many years’ Internet experience are particularly aggressive toward […]
Is Spam Killing the Killer App? Email was the original “killer app” of the Internet, and it remains the most popular online activity. Some 93% of adult American Internet users, about 117 million people, use email. On any given day online, nearly twice as many Internet users will log on to email as will engage […]
A quarter of Internet users consider spam to be a problem. While just about every emailer complains about spam, we wanted to see who is particularly aggrieved by spam and why. We looked at the 25% of Internet users who, when asked to describe how spam has affected their life on the Internet, answered that […]
Spam exists because it is profitable, but emailers have defenses they can use. There are many profiteers in the lucrative spam industry: Email address list builders scavenge and sell lists of email addresses. Software makers and marketers build and sell cheap programs that facilitate numerous illegal spam activities: look for vulnerable, hackable email servers, disguise […]