If you've been keeping track of Nielsen//NetRatings and Media Metrix weekly numbers, you're very familiar with the concepts of at-home Internet use and at-work Internet use. However useful these
numbers have been, there is a lot of controversy about measuring techniques that surrounds them.
According to researchers at eMarketer, workplace Internet use has long been under reported
because companies were "hesitant to have tracking software installed on their computers and workers weren't eager to tell interviewers how much they surfed on company time."
eMarketer has
taken it upon themselves to find out the truth about the business users and according to data they collected, 55.3 million users (73% of the adult online population) have accessed the web from work
in the past year, a little over 31 million users (41%) access the Internet primarily from the workplace and only 11.4 million users (15%) are exclusively workplace users.
eMarketer also
estimates that the average work user will spend nearly 2.5 hours online during a day, 12 hours online per week and 50 hours online per month. Out of that time, slightly less than one-third (31%) of
time is non-work related - Angus Reid Group reports that using search engines (89%) and checking news and sports (75%) are favorite activities.