• by Masha Geller , June 21, 2001

With all this talk about email usage exploding in the future with gazillions of marketing messages, I was particularly surprised by this piece of research out of Europe.

It looks like in Britain, interest in email is waning. According to research just published by the Consumer's Association (CA), 36% of Brits (16 million) now surf the Net compared to 27% just a year ago, but despite that surge, the percentages of email users is actually falling.

This year's CA survey found that only 5% of Internet users in the U.K. consider email to be their preferred means of keeping in touch, compared with 14% two years ago.

The research also found that the online gender gap has now almost disappeared with users split 55% males to 45% females.

The report also shows that although there are more Brits online than ever before, the trend now is to spend less time surfing the Web, with 63% of users in this years survey spending under five hours a week online.

The CA says that the PC remains the primary means of connecting to the Web for the vast majority of Internet users (94%), with the digital TV not taking off to any great extent - despite predictions last year that this would be the case.

Interest in digital TV is also on the wane, with only 20% of respondents saying they expected to be surfing the Net using their TV sets at any time in the near future.

Broadband is definitely the topic of interest amongst Internet users this year, with 40% saying they wanted to surf the Net using a broadband connection. On top of this, a further 7% said they were already hooked up to the Internet using a cable modem, digital subscriber line (DSL) or similar broadband link.

The report is available at http://www.which.net/surveys.

***************************************************** HELP!

As you know from an email we sent out last week, MediaPost is conducting a very quick member survey to figure out how we can better serve you. In return, we're giving away a free DVD player and five Rich Media Planning Kits. So if you haven't done so already, please fill it out and enter to win (the whole thing should take about 3 minutes). Drawing is June 29 so please take the survey today. *************************************************************