AIMC (Association for Media Research) has presented its 9th Internet Users Survey “Internet Surfers”, a study that highlights the percentage of users who use the Internet to download movies (51.1% , 7.7 points more than the previous year) and music (56%, which represents an increase of 5.1 percentage points). An also quite high percentage of users have downloaded podcasts (21.1%), and the rate of Internet users who publish videos on the Internet has also experienced great growth (21.8%).
Another activity that has also experienced growth has been IP telephony, which has gone from 18% to 21%. Among those surveyed who use it, the increase in calls to both IP numbers and conventional telephones stands out, although 60.1% of users only make calls to IP telephones.
Content creation has also experienced great growth in 2006, with a surprising 46% of users generating content for web / blog / photos / videos on the internet, compared to 39.5% publishing information on webs / blogs and photos on last year.
94.7% of users use a desktop computer to access the Internet, although the laptop is gaining ground (the percentage has grown from 42.6% to 51.5%). The mobile phone has also seen an increase in its share as an Internet access device, from 16.8% in 2005 to 20.5% in 2006. It is followed by the PDA (9.3%) and the video game console (8.3%). %). The majority of users have ADSL connections at home (72% compared to 64.1% in 2005), followed by 18.7% who enjoy access through cable networks. The connection through Wi-Fi networks has also seen its share grow in homes (from 28.8% to 43%), and at work, although to a lesser extent (from 11% to 14.9%). The main ADSL provider in the home is Telefónica, with 39.1% of the responses, followed by Ono (19.7%) and Orange / Wanadoo (10.8%).
Advertising and spam, main problems
The excess of advertising continues to be one of the main drawbacks that users cite when evaluating their perception of the internet, with 61.8% of responses and the first position on the list. It is followed closely by infection by viruses or spyware, although this time it has dropped from 62.4% to 57.5% of the responses, a figure that the study authors attribute to a lower perception of infections and not to a real reduction of the problem.
Spam, for its part, has increased alarmingly, from 32% of users receiving 26 or more junk emails per week to 45.4%. The average indicates that it has gone from receiving 43 to 71 spam messages per week, and this despite the fact that 76.1% of users use an antispam filter.
Microsoft software loses ground
Although it continues to hold the first position among the browsers used to access the Internet, Internet Explorer (73.7%) continues to lose ground to its main competitor, Mozilla Firefox, which has increased its share by 8 points from 15.6% to 23 , 9% of users. In the area of email clients, Microsoft Outlook has also seen its suota reduced, from 47.9% to 40.6%, to the benefit of web-based email services, which are used by 25.1% of users. users.
Finally, in terms of the ranking of search engines used on the internet, Google occupies the first place with 47.7% of the responses, followed by Yahoo with 17.4% and MSN with 5.2%. The first also leads the list of the last five websites visited by Internet users, followed by Hotmail, Marca, Yahoo, El País and El Mundo.
www.aimc.es
