2005 Annual Report - Online Audience

What do the numbers suggest about whether online news consumption will continue to grow? Has the universe of online news consumers - and online population overall - reached something of a ceiling? If so, will the growth now be in the time people spend getting news online rather than in the number of people doing it?

Answering those questions is difficult, but three factors - Internet household penetration, demographics, and broadband growth - point to growth both in the online population and the time it spends online.

First, the online population overall is expected to keep growing. In 2004, the percentage of households with Internet access had reached nearly 67%, up from 64% in 2003, according to Forrester Research, a technology research company.9 As long as this household penetration keeps increasing, meaning more people online, the number of online news consumers will likely grow. Forrester Research projects that overall Internet penetration - for those with either broadband or dial-up connections- will continue to grow over the next few years.

Second, demographics are likely to fuel growth in the online population as younger, Internet-adopting generations replace older, more resistant populations.

The third issue is expansion of broadband technology, which provides high-speed connection to the Internet. Web professionals have usually predicted that people will use the Internet more when they have higher-speed connections because of the significantly greater ease of use. Broadband use is growing steadily both in the number of subscriptions to broadband services and the number of people accessing the Web via broadband. Further, at least two studies suggest that the expectation that broadband technology encourages online news consumption is correct.10

Those three factors - overall Internet penetration trends, the age factor, and growth in broadband use - seem to offer evidence that online news consumption will grow.