New Online Activities Show Greatest Growth

By Enid Burns | December 8, 2006

Relatively new Internet activities such as blogs, video, and phone calls are the fastest-growing in terms of usage, though old standby services like e-mail and shopping continue to dominate Internet users' time. A report released by Mediamark Research observes adult Internet users' online activities.

A few new activities, while small in reach, show the highest growth. Voice over IP calling is used by 2.6 percent of American adults who use the Internet, but has seen year-to-year increase of 197.7 percent. About 6.7 percent of adults have visited blogs, a 163.9 percent increase from a year ago. Video is watched by 11.4 percent of U.S. adults, up 123.7 percent over 2005 data.

"We should not be surprised that relatively newer activities on the Internet have lower overall usage," said Anne Marie Kelly, VP of marketing and strategic planning at MRI, in a statement.

Top online activities include e-mail (70.5 percent), though year-to-year growth is 1.6 percent from 2005; reading news and current events (40.2 percent) which is down 4.6 percent from the same time last year; and e-commerce purchases (34.2 percent) which grew 5.7 percent over last year, and 57.7 percent year-over-year growth since 2002. Sales from e-commerce continue to grow over the holiday season.

Finance categories such as paying bills online and tracking and trading stocks account for 30.7 percent and 13.2 percent of U.S. adults respectively. These two categories are new to the MRI survey.

The data are a portion of an extensive survey conducted by Mediamark Research in September and October. In-person interviews were conducted in the homes of about 26,000 respondents. The subset of data in this release is limited to respondents with Internet access, about 80 percent of the survey pool.