• by Masha Geller , November 26, 2001

To start the week off with some good news, Nielsen//NetRatings released a report which showed that overall Internet usage rebounded in October from a drop in September. According to NetRatings, the active Internet universe grew a healthy 3.6% in October, which when combined with a similarly robust increase in Internet sessions and page views, signals a return to wider use of the Internet as people broaden their activities from the targeted news gathering of last month.

But that’s not all. It looks like advertisers have to pay more attention to the time of day their ads are running. The Nielsen//NetRatings Global Internet Index for October found that surfers in Italy, France, Australia and the US who access the Internet from work spend considerably more time online than home web users. And, even though the sheer number of work users is considerably smaller than the number of home users in each market, work users are much more active.

According to Richard Goosey, NetRatings' chief of measurement science and analytics, work Internet usage adds up to more time spent online and more Internet sessions, which is due to greater connection speeds and better usability. Moreover, work sessions tend to be more focused, with obvious usage peaks during regular business hours. Therefore, Goosey says, marketers should now take the work audience and its particular Internet patterns under careful consideration when considering content.

He said that core applications such as banking, online trading and industry specific directory searches are "well targeted to the focused work audience, while marketers planning event promotions, content updates and traffic flow should assume a surge in work usage during the business day and a surge in home usage into the evening hours."

Researchers also found that the global work Internet audiences are much more heavily male than US audiences. Women have outranked men in the US at home Internet audience since spring 2000, and the combined US at home and at work audience shows that the demographics remain the same when office use is added. But a look at the Italian and French audiences - already heavily male - shows a disproportionate number of males logging on from work.