Why are we Here?

Cliff Quinn

The Fourth Hermes Survey

Extracts from The Fourth Survey of The University of Michegan’s Hermes project, a research project on the commercial uses of the World Wide Web.

Find the full report, data, and earlier reports at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sgupta/hermes/ .

Reason for using the Web

Browsing and fun and games continue as primary reasons for using the Web.

Paying for Services

The percentage of people who do not want to pay at all for WWW services has risen by almost 10 points! In part this change is consistent with the skepticism and caution expressed by respondents elsewhere in the survey. Some of this change may also be due to a slight change in the wording of the question (though this really is unlikely to be a major part of the explanation).

It is still noteworthy that 68% of the people are willing to consider paying. Web site designers must redouble their efforts to provide meaningful and entertaining content.

Usage of WWW Resources

Reference materials and online newspapers and magazines are most popular with the respondents, followed by commercial products and services info, research reports, government, weather, financial and shopping

Female respondents seem less impressed by the sites providing information about commercial products and services.

Nonetheless, the higher rating for commercial information and the very low rating for shopping is consistent with results from the earlier survey and with some of the other surveys available.

How They Find out about Web sites and how they get there

Using links from others' pages to find new sites is very popular. This bodes well for the advertising model being adopted at so many Web sites. Of course, choosing the appropriate sites (the ones most likely to attract prospects) assumes great importance.

Need good marketing research!

Own hotlists are the most common method of navigating to a Web site. So, understanding how these hotlists get formed, and then evolve, is important.

Finally, the use of search pages and meta indices to get to Web sites has increased considerably. YAHOO!