There are many companies and authors that estimate the size of the Networked Society and their efforts are helpful in estimating Total and Sales Addressable Market figures. We have previously noted remarks made by the CEO of Nokia this December that placed the Networked Society at 1.2 billion people. Most of this count, it would appear, are mobile telephone subscribers using devices that can not access Internet.

Nielsen//NetRating's recent poll, using their software running on a sample of the population, produced the following results. These figures are more indicative of the Sales Addressable Market on Internet. For added clarity we have also shown the definitions for their terms.

Sales Addressable Market (SAM)

Tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings' applications metering module worldwide.

December 2003

Current Digital Media Universe Estimate 421,653,760

Active Digital Media Universe 276,800,718

Definitions:

Current Digital Media Universe Estimate: People over the age of 2 that have access to the Internet from a personal computer at home; includes active and non-active persons in the household.

Active Digital Media Universe: People that have used a computer capable of connecting to the Internet AND visited a Web site and/or launched any computer file tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings' applications metering module.

Do these figures impune the figures given by Nokia? As always, it depends on your viewpoint and the objective you are after.

The NetRatings number is one you can, for a price, obtain email addresses for - that is 421 million computers or 276 million people that are active on the Internet.

We look at the long term fundamental forces at work in the marketplace. From that perspective Nokia, Motorola, Sanyo, Sony, Handspring and Palm will rapidly succeed in selling and replacing older models with newer ones - all of which will access Internet.

As we stated in other articles, the global change over from Analog, single purpose devices to Digital, Multi-functional,
Network capable, Mobile devices is accelerating and within the decade will be the norm.

Terry and Lisa Wellman

Powered by CityMax.com