• by Masha Geller , April 27, 2001

Here's an interesting stat about at-work Internet surfers: of all destinations on the web, people are choosing to hang out at NASA.gov.

The Internet ratings report for the week ending April 22 from Nielsen//NetRatings, shows that traffic to NASA.gov spiked 75% as office workers flocked to the site to get the latest video and audio updates of the space shuttle Endeavor launch. Traffic to the site jumped to 567,000 unique visitors for the week ending April 22, making it one of the fastest growing domains at work. Men comprised 56% of the traffic, while women made up 44%. Surfers spent an average of five minutes on the site, with most visitors logging on to get up-to-the- minute audio and video feeds of the space crew's daily activities. And they choose to do so during working hours.

Overall, Yahoo! still reigns supreme atop the at-work most visited web properties, followed by AOL Time Warner, MSN, Microsoft and Terra Lycos.

According to NetRatings, 34.2 million people logged on to the web from their office computers an average of 12 times a week, for about 30 minutes each time (just over 6 hours total). During that time, they visited about 15 sites, or 34 pages, spending 55 seconds on each page. NetRatings calculated that the average at-work click rate for top banners was at .16% last week, which is up 14.3% from the week before.

Comparatively, NetRatings found that the at-home active Internet user base is more than double that of at-work – 76.8 million, but at-home users visited an average of just 6 sites and spent half as much time online overall – about 3 hours total. The at-home click rate for top banners held constant with the week prior at .25%.