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Nielsen Report Says Internet Usage Flattening

Posted by timothy on from the adding-to-the-divide dept.

Ant writes "This BetaNews story says an analysis of major Internet markets revealed that the time netizens spend online at home has come close to hitting a plateau in many major markets. Nielsen//NetRatings, a syndicated rating system for Internet audience measurement, measured markets in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States and found them to be maturing. In contrast, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy and Japan experienced double-digit growth. According to Nielsen//NetRatings' press release (PDF) and current news story concluded that mature markets are in wait of "the next big thing" whereas emerging markets were rife with opportunity for companies online. Some of the growth engines cited in the report is the proliferation of broadband and societal changes in media consumption..."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. My internet usage has leveled off, too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apparently it's impossible to average more than 24 hours online a day.

  2. Time online in February? by wasted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The statistics in the news article show time online in February 2005. I would expect a decline in time online compared to February 2004, since February 2004 had 29 days and February 2005 had 28 days.

    Then again, maybe they compensated for that descrepancy when computing their statistics.

  3. Re:Does this mean we get to keep IPv4? by gnuman99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    IPv4 fell apart long time ago. The problem is people don't see it. A parallel is if you go to heavily poluted areas like Bangladesh, where the leading cause of death for traffic cops is lung cancer, people will not see polution as a major concern! Even on days when you can't see half a mile thanks to smog, people say they need more roads and want a car. They don't even mention they want clean air and a quiet environment.

    Exactly the same crap is occuring with IPv4. Sure, there is lots of IP addresses, if everyone gets one number that changes all the time. Then you have to be a second-class "internet citizen", always stuck behind a NAT. Want to run a game server? maybe some bittorrent? Then you have to jump though hoops forwarding freaking ports all the time.

    And let's not get started with port scans, virus probes and spammers wasting your bandwith. And that's on a new IP address. Some places can get a GB/mo of crap like this.

    IPv6 solves all of these problems. No more NAT cruft or virus scans. A new IP address, when not in use, is acutally *clean* (no traffic). IPv6 solve many, many more problems than just increase number of addresses.

    Oh, most people might not know or care, but has anyone seen some of the enormous routing tables on the internet? IPv4 is soooo fragmented, that the routing tables are now a serious problem in scallability of the internet. And everyone is paying higher prices thanks to this.