Wednesday, July 02, 2008


Internet users per household

I'm looking for data that would help estimate the number of Internet users per household (or, rather, "per Internet-connected household") in the United States.

If you perform a web search for "Internet users per household", you get a bunch of sites -- all of which are addressing this question in a country other than the United States.

Isn't this the sort of information our government should track in some way? There's a bill that wants to mandate a study of applying net neutrality regulations to high-speed Internet access services, but we don't know how to count Internet users per household.

Somebody help me!

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7 Comments:

At 9:46 AM, July 03, 2008, Blogger Gregory Kohs said...

The always helpful and smart-as-a-whip Tanya Masiello at Nielsen provided me this back of the enveloped estimate (which I've touched up just a smidgen):


1. Number of internet users in the US: 218,302,574 (Nielsen Online, as of March 2008; http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm)

2. Percent of these users who have home access. Guess: 85%

3. Number of home Internet users (product of #1 and #2): 185,500,000

4. Number of households in the US: 112,363,000 (US Census, projected figure for 2008; http://www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p25-1129.pdf)

5. Penetration rate of internet in US households: It varies, but guess: ~75%

6. Number of households with internet: ~84,272,000 (product of #4 and #5)

7. Average number of internet users per household: ~2.20 (#3 divided by #6)

It's very rough, but it certainly gets the job done for an internal briefing. Thank you, Tanya!

 
At 2:07 PM, July 13, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

TNS Global (www.tnsglobal.com)has very strong research department on internet and net penetration on users.

 
At 5:01 AM, September 08, 2009, Blogger The Man with the Plan said...

Thanks for this.. i was also looking for this stats

 
At 6:50 AM, September 08, 2009, Blogger Gregory Kohs said...

I'm happy to report that this blog post is now the #1 Google search result for "Internet users per household".

 
At 3:04 PM, March 25, 2010, Anonymous Anonymous said...

BROADBAND ADOPTION AND USE IN AMERICA (OBI WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 1) FCC February 2010 might have some useful stats to round out the previous posts .../andrew

 
At 3:56 PM, March 25, 2010, Blogger Gregory Kohs said...

Previous comment refers to:

BROADBAND ADOPTION AND USE IN AMERICA

 
At 10:19 PM, June 18, 2012, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is such an interesting story at it gives in-depth information to the reader as well. Good thing you have it shared. <a href=

 

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