The document discusses the rise of internet usage globally. It notes that internet users now make up 57% of the global population and people on average spend over 6 hours online per day. The number of devices that can access the internet is also growing rapidly, including phones, tablets, appliances and more. Google is by far the most popular search engine, handling over 3.8 million queries per minute. The types of items most commonly purchased online include clothing, home goods, food and more. Video content is also increasingly popular for learning about products and services due to time constraints. Overall internet usage and reliance on it for work, shopping and information continues to grow significantly worldwide.

1. No Turning Back
The Rise of The Internet
Introduction
Do you think early users of the Internet, the government boffins in the 1950s and 60s, had
any idea of how integral it would become in lives of ordinary people?
Image 1: Many hands on the hunt for information. AgeingInPlace, 2020.
Indeed its influence has been all-encompassing … all consuming. This presentation will look
at the effects of this meteoric rise on our everyday lives – how we use the internet and why
it’s become so important in our world.

2. Access to the Internet
Image 2: Global distribution of Internet users. Internet World Stats, 2020
The Internet is growing.
Since the launch of the World Wide Web in 1990, it has grown exponentially.
According the marketing company ClickZ (2020), “internet users now make up 57% of the
global population” and “on average, people spend six hours and 42 minutes online each
day.”

3. Moreover, Internet speeds are increasing.
In his article for Visual Capitalist (2019), Desjardins shows, via a colourful graph, that 188
million emails are sent every minute, and Google processes “3.8 million queries” in this
time.
Image 3: The way it pans out in 60 seconds. Visual Capitalist, 2019

4. Digital Devices People Are Using
Evidently, internet speed is increasing. The same can be said for sheer number of devices
people use to board this “fast train”. ClickZ (2020) estimates that by 2021, a projected 72%
of all ecommerce sales will come from mobile devices.
Image 4: Estimated mobile e-commerce sales worldwide. ClickZ, 2019

5. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the plethora of items that have been (and are yet to be)
connected to the net. Devices come in all shapes. These include phones, tablets, fridges,
televisions, cameras and washing machines just to name a few.
Image 5: Many appliances make up the Internet of Things stratosphere. Washington
Business Journal, 2015.
According to Bach (2015) the amount of IoT devices grew from 3 billion in 2013 to about 4.9
billion in 2015. It was estimated at the time the figure in 2020 would swell to 25 billion.

6. How Customers Search for Information
Image 6: Searching for a search engine. Mud, 2015
Internet users search for information using a number of different search engines. However,
there is one that stands far above the rest and that is Google. Its name has become part of
our idiom. Nine other popular search engines are Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex.ru,
DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, AOL.com.

7. Image 8: Google’s gratuitous slice of the pie. Kinsta, 2020

8. Image 9: Yahoo’s eye-catching promo. Kinsta, 2020
What Consumers Buy Online
Primarily they buy convenience. They also buy cost and time saving. Just about everything
want or need sorted in your life has an online option.
According to an Australia Post report (2019) Fashion continued to lead the way in number of
online purchases with Activewear being the leading item.
mage 10: Activewear continued as top online choice for fashion seekers. Racked, 2017.

9. Also among the top performing categories are Variety Stores and Marketplaces; Health and
Beauty; Homewares and Appliances; Hobbies and Recreation Goods; Media; and Specialty
Food and Liquor, such as non-perishable goods and organic food. (Australia Post, 2019)
Image 11: Organic food, faring well in the list of items regularly being purchased online.
Expat Living, 2020

10. How has Online Video Consumption Changed?
Customers are responding to video with a report (Meyer, 2019) saying there had been an
increase in conversion rates with 62% of consumers saying they watch product reviews
before making a purchase.
Image 12: The internet and video … a stunning symbiosis. SEJ, Digital Advertising, 2018
We’re a time sensitive bunch
One of the main things people complain about nowadays is being time poor. One reason for
the changes in video consumption could be attributed to this busyness. “People would often
prefer to watch a two-minute video versus taking 15 minutes to read the same
information.” (Dickey, 2018). She also said presenters at a 2017 marketing professionals
Inbound conference agreed that roughly half of all the content marketers produced should
be video.

11. Image 13. When will this rise in video plays reach its zenith? WordStream Blog, 2020

12. Consumer Trends
The number of people using the net has increased from 3.2 billion in 2015 (BBC, 2015) to 4.5
billion today (Internet World Stats, 2020).
The number of people using the internet has surged over the past year, with more than one
million people coming online for the for the first time, each day, since January 2018. (Kemp,
2019)
With more competition to produce devices to be part of it, there is both more access and
it’s more cost effectiveness. Thus, there is more to see, more to do and more to learn about.
Image 14: The physical benefits of the internet are palpable, and can now be tapped into by
more than ever before. AgingInPlace, 2020

13. Image 15: Google is building up a picture of data and the internet is doing its bit to see it realised.
New York Times, 2019

14. Summary
It seems like almost everything in the business world is dependent upon the Internet. Not to
mention our social interactions, our retail experiences, our emergency information
gathering, or learning about anything you want … it’s just a few clicks away.
As we have seen, more and more have access to this super-knowledge, this super shop, this
behemoth of information that houses the good, the bad and the utterly irrelevant.
People mostly “Google it” but there are a variety of search engines they can use. And
according to statistics, they’re relying more on video to provide answers in an increasingly
time-poor, attention-deficient modern society.
Image 16: Woman working on her company’s website at Sparky’s Coffeehouse in
Washington, US. New York Times, 2018.