Web User Research Published
A survey carried out by GVU, an American-based research centre, has found that the average age of Internet users in the UK and Ireland is 28 with 22% of users being women, up from 15% six months ago.
The occupations of Internet users is biased towards education and computer areas, with professionals showing a drop in usage over six months from 17% to 13%.
In terms of political allegiances, the majority of users (29%) describe themselves as liberal and moderate (23%) with only 12% saying they were conservative.
In terms of income, the highest percentage of users (17%) earned between £32,000 and £47,000, whilst 24% earned between £12,853 and £25,064.
When asked about paying for the Internet, most users understandably did not want to pay for services (63%), but a surprising amount (15%) were more in favour of pay-per-view than subscription (9%) and per hour (6%).
Whilst the Internet is undoubtedly still a developing media, the research does show that most users are a desirable target for advertisers: they are young and high earning and fall into the ABC1 category. Whilst a lot of users are in education most are students and will be therefore be the future high-fliers sought after by advertisers.