Broadband is the online choice for over half the Internet users in the US. According to a survey of 2,200 Americans over 18, released Monday by the non-profit Pew Internet & American Life Project. About 68 million people, representing 55% of all adults who surf the Net, now have access to cable, DSL or other high-speed cyberconnections at the office or, increasingly, at home.
* As of February, 48 million folks, or 39% of Net users, had adopted speedy access at home. That’s a 60% climb compared with the 30 million home users in March 2003.
* Though cable modems remain the broadband vehicle of choice, a surge in DSL subscriptions is helping fuel the rise. DSL now claims a 42% share of the home broadband market, up from 28% a year ago. For one thing, the DSL camp is doing a better job of rolling out its infrastructure and filling orders, says Pew researcher John Horrigan.
One enormous factor that may also account for this shift is that phone companies have been lowering prices and offering DSL in conjunction with long-distance and wireless phone plans.
What does this mean for Internet marketing and search portals? Well, if 55% of Americans have access to broadband Internet, that frees up the playing field for multimedia, audio and video feed search engines like Singing Fish or AltaVista, easy and fast file swapping, and targeted video style advertising in normal ad spots, or within Instant messenger tools.
With such a shift in preference of Internet hookup, we may also see a shift in forms of contextual advertising and also someone of a hybrid between online advertisng and traditonal commericials.
One company that is probably quite happy about this statistic is Yahoo, who’s SBC Yahoo DSL just partered with CinemaNow to bring Video On Demand to its customers. When a Yahoo DSL user wants to see a film, music video, or short, they simply pay a small fee for the ability to download. With this most recent survey on Internet users and broadband, coupled with the recent success of Apple and Napster with pay-per-download music & media, Yahoo is bound to again capitalize on a breaking trend in online media.
