A December 22, 2003 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, pulling together more than three years of tracking survey data into one picture of who was online and what they were doing there. The numbers come from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between March 2000 and December 2002, with additional data from an August 2003 survey.
The headline finding is a plateau. After the rush of the late 1990s, the online population had essentially stopped growing, even as the people already there kept finding more to do.
63% of Americans now go online — last measured in our August 2003 survey.
31% of Internet users who go online from home have broadband as of August 2003.
Email was still the center of gravity, and the report says so plainly. Among the 25 core activities tracked, online banking grew fastest — the kinds of transactions that required people to trust the medium.
Email continues to be the “killer app” of the Internet. More people use email than do any other activity online.
Online banking increased by 127% — more than any other activity about which we asked 2000 and 2002. In March 2000, just 15 million had tried some form of online banking, but by October 2002, 34 million had done so.
For those of us in the news business, the news line is the one worth marking: the online news audience grew 50% between March 2000 and December 2002, from 52 million to 78 million, and Pew credits big events — Campaign 2000, September 11, the run-up to the Iraq war — with each ratcheting the daily audience up a notch and leaving it there.
The conclusion reads as a prediction, and it holds up better than most:
All the trends set out here seem destined to continue, if not evolve, as the technology gets better, the applications become simpler, the appliances that use the Internet become omnipresent, and the technology fades into the background of people’s lives — as powerful, ubiquitous, commonplace, and “invisible” as electricity.
Some 2026 context for the numbers above, which is what makes this document interesting to me: the 63% of American adults online in August 2003 is now in the mid-90s — Pew’s recent tracking puts adult internet use at roughly 95%, which is about as close to universal as survey research gets.
Home broadband, at 31% of home users in 2003, is now the norm rather than the advantage, and the “dial-up user” category that Pew compares against on nearly every page of this report has effectively vanished. Smartphone ownership, which does not appear in this report at all, now runs around 90% of adults, and a meaningful share of Americans go online only through a phone.
That last point is the real gap between 2003 and now. Pew’s 2003 framework assumed a computer, a connection, and a user who sat down to do a discrete thing — check a score, book a flight, read the news. The report’s own prediction about the technology fading into the background came true, and in doing so it dissolved the categories Pew was counting.
Mary Madden is the principal author; Lee Rainie, the project’s director, is listed as editor.
