Commercial site: Industry Almanac: http://www.c-i-a.com/199809iu.htm Nua: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi), CyberAtlas - http://cyberatlas.internet.com E-Marketer - (http://www.emarketer.com www.telegeography.com
Organizations: http://www.oecd.org//dsti/sti/it/prod/it-out2000-e.htm http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/ http://www.itu.int http://www.idc.com.
Actually IDC is a commercial site -- which charges far, far higher prices than any of the "commercial sites" listed for anything they publish, as it happens. (On the converse side is E-Marketer, whose research process consists of "aggregating" the work that everyone else does.) Keep in mind too that many, even most, of these statistics tend to rest heavily on the others. This is especially the case for Internet user statistics: ITU, eMarketer, and NUA all recompile other data and add it together, despite what are often fairly important differences in methodology between the different data sets they are reusing. Not sure what ILO is using, and can't recall off the top of my head what's in the HDR -- IDC, maybe? -- but it would be surprising were their research not compiled from somewhere else. (OECD has some nice and fairly cautious numbers on broadband deployment AFAIK the only original research on human Internet user populations in the work above is that undertaken by very large firms such as IDC; another source is Ipsos-Reid (formerly Angus Reid), the Canadian company now owned by France's Ipsos. I'm not sure how the fellow at C-I-A compiled his data, but I believe -- this is usually the case -- it has to do with multiples of Internet hosts; the multiplier may be derived as dependent on other variables. The reason for this paucity is, of course, that sizing Internet user populations is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process. A really interesting doctoral thesis to read would be one which took apart and compared the various methodologies as a way of explaining the wide divergences in results. Or: data points are memes, and they travel, but in so doing they obscure their origins; call it a fetish for numbers. cheers Bram -- / Bram Dov Abramson / babramson@telegeography.com / / Director of Internet Research / TeleGeography, Inc. / / tel: +1 202 741 0047 (new numbers) / fax: +1 202 741 0021 (we've moved)