Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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 […]
Most email users find spam annoying, but do not consider it a big problem. When asked how spam affects life on the Internet, the majority of emailers (59%) describe spam as “annoying, but not a big problem.” On one extreme, 27% of email users say spam is a “big problem” for them, and on the […]
There is no “typical” email user, and there is no “typical” burden of spam. Spam places a real and uninvited burden on email users. To help assess that burden, we asked emailers how many emails they receive; how much of that incoming email is spam; and how much time they spend dealing with their spam. […]
This dataset contains tracking questions about online activities. It also contains an extensive battery of questions pertaining to the volume of “spam” email, Internet users’ attitudes towards spam and the use of email filtering.