The Internet Index

Number 16
Inspired by "Harper's Index"*
Compiled by Win Treese ( treese@OpenMarket.com)
20 December 1996

Here is Internet Index #16 annotated with sources and the directory of all editions.

Number of state attorneys general working with the US Food and Drug Administration to evaluate regulation of fraudulent medical claims on the Internet: 39

Number of major corporate Web sites surveyed for e-mail capabilities by the Wall Street Journal: 24
Percentage of those sites that never responded: 38

Number of hours in which Reebok attempts to respond to e-mail requests: 24

Cost of an hour of Internet time at Beijing's Internet Cafe, in yuan: 30
Approximate cost of that hour, in dollars: 3.60

Estimated number of Internet users in China at the end of 1996: 100,000

Estimated number of adult Americans who use the Web daily: 9 million

Percentage increase in number of frame relay (a wide-area networking technology) customers worldwide, from January, 1994, to January, 1996: 900

Percentage of revenue Cisco Systems hopes to be processed online by July, 1997: 30

Number of Federal court class-action securities complaints available online: 64

Number of Web sites warned by the FTC that they may be operating illegal pyramid schemes (approximately): 500
Number of lawsuits filed by the FTC alleging online scams: 15

Number of occurrences of the word "the" in documents indexed by Alta Vista: 432,118,690

Amount spent by MCI upgrading the Internet backbone, in millions of dollars: 60

Percentage increase in Internet traffic, per month, estimated by MCI: 30

Number of "wanted posters" posted on the Wells Fargo Bank Web site: 11
Number marked "arrested": 2

Advertising revenue on the Web in the third quarter of 1996, in millions of dollars: 66
Percentage increase from the second quarter: 43


Copyright 1996 by Win Treese. "Harper's Index" is a registered trademark of Harper's Magazine Foundation. Send updates or interesting statistics to treese@OpenMarket.com

To subscribe to future issues of the Internet Index, send a message saying "subscribe" in the body to internet-index-request@OpenMarket.com.