August 2, 2010

Stats! Stats! Stats!

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

I hear a tidbit on the radio the other day. It said that over one third of the computers on the Internet are used for

porn.

(Sorry about the break. I’m trying to be dramatic.)

The number was something like 36 percent.

I’m not sure if that’s 36 percent of the servers, web sites, web pages, or whatnot. I’m also not sure what qualifies as porn; are pictures of celebrities getting out of cars porn? It seems so, these days.

Given my love for statistics, I was blessed the other day with an email from Stephanie from the Double Forte marketing group. Support.com did a survey of computer users and here are the stats that stood out the most for me:

• Online gaming is most popular with the younger crowd. Duh. But the numbers were surprising to me: Of 20-year-olds, 61% played online games. The number holds steady at 61% for 30-year-olds, but then drops to 51% for 40-somethings.

• The number one thing 20-somethings use their computers for is social networking. The least favorite thing mentioned was reading books online.

• For the old farts, their favorite thing to do was reading the news or sports. Their least-favorite thing was, like the kiddos, reading books online.

• News and sport reading was the number one thing that consumed most folk’s computer time.

• Comparatively speaking, most people feel more overwhelmed by paying bills, health insurance, managing their retirement accounts, and shopping for groceries than they feel overwhelmed by computers.

• It’s possible to be overwhelmed, and it’s possible to underwhelmed, but can anyone just be plain old whelmed?

• Most people felt that they could better deal with a computer problem than a minor health issue.

• Lots of people are fearful of getting a virus or other computer problem from a social networking site than just about any other thing that they do online. That makes sense to me.

• Most people try to solve their computer problems themselves. Typically the first thing they try is to restart the computer.

• By a more than two-to-one margin, people will call up a computer savvy friend before they resort to phoning up tech support.

• More men than women would rather phone tech support than ask for directions.

The survey was a bit skewed, of course, since Support.com paid for it and they’re an online tech support company. Being a statistician myself, I could see that many of the questions were leading and they were trying to elicit some interesting replies. Here’s the summary from the press release:

  • Nearly four in ten (36%) consumers would rather be late to an important meeting than lose all of their personal files stored on their PC.
  • Despite the tough economy and the high unemployment rate, 20% of those polled would choose missing an important job interview over losing their data.
  • Americans rely heavily on their PCs as a communication portal, where they can read news (72%) stay in touch with friends and colleagues on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (69%) and chat online with family (47%).

Interesting stuff.

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