[9725] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
The search for Internet market demographics...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel P Dern)
Tue Jan 18 09:27:57 1994
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 1994 09:23:55 -0500
From: ddern@world.std.com (Daniel P Dern)
To: com-priv@psi.com
With all due respect to Lloyd, I get 1-3 calls or msgs like
this per week (averaged out), I'm sure John Quarterman &
Smoot Carl-Mitchell at Texas Internet Consulting/MIDS and others
are getting similar or higher (esp. since I often refer folks there),
plus we see postings regularly to usenet seeking this data for
grad papers or for biz use.
This sure would be useful info to have, yup yup. Sometimes I
take 10 minutes to explore why the #s are large and semi-meaningless
(billions and billions... but how do you define 'an internet user'...
is everyone at DEC qualify? how do yo differntiate between
'active users' vs 'potential users'...etc. It's like asking 'how many
biz phone users are there including everyone at all PBX extensions?"
Good information on this would be great. It would also have value;
I'd hope anyone seeking it for business purposes would be prepared
to pay for it (and indeed, anyone ready to base business decisions
on free info from random sources may be acting prematurely...).
The fact is, we've got some #s, largely accumulated by Mssrs
Quarterman and S C-M, some from the NSFniks at MERIT, some by Tony
R and his packet sniffing elves. Meaningful demographics? I don't
think so. Heck, we don't even have -- to my knowledge -- good
stats and comparatives on the leading Internet service providers.
By comparison, if you put out the call for comparative service
charts for AT&T, MCI, Sprint, etc., you'd be flooded with faxed
charts by consultants faster than you could reload.
Anybody making up "com-priv" buttons for ComNet?
DPD
