A Study for Advertisers — or for Newspapers?

This Washingtonpost.com and Nielsen//NetRatings study looks into the usage habits of women on the Internet. Jupiter Research claimed earlier this year that 63 percent of U.S. women are online and 70 percent will be by 2006. Caroline Little, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, says the goal of the study was to assist advertisers in understanding “a very massive audience” of daytime-working women. Quite unsurprisingly, functions like time-saving applications and shopping or product research are critical and form a key motivation for usage that is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Allow me to add that the target of the study might as well have been to help newspapers and their online operations to understand how to best serve this demographic. The imminent-service nature of the Internet and the need of local information market leaders to provide this service with a view to the local marketplace is both vastly underrated and accordingly strongly underdeveloped among online news operations (as my judging duty for this year’s EPpy awards confirmed).