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Self-service: moving to self-sufficiency

Banking, shopping, entertainment, research, travel, job seeking, chatting—pick a category and one theme will ring clear—self-service. People of all age groups are spending more time online doing things for themselves. According to one study, 71.1 percent of Americans were using the Internet in 2002; of these, 51.9 percent of them were reading news online and 35.5 percent were seeking medical information. Perhaps not coincidentally, 34 percent of Internet users in 2002 were older than 65, belying the stereotype of the youthful Web surfer.3 Internet use is not only a U.S. phenomenon; many sources show significant Internet usage worldwide.4

In less than half a decade, consumers worldwide have learned to become efficient online purchasers. Studies show that many of the early roadblocks of online exchange—slow access, poor customer service, lack of security—have largely been eliminated. Almost half of the U.S. population purchased books online in 2002.5

The growth rates for using online services in the U.S. have also been experienced by the major economies worldwide. Over 30 percent of consumers across the U.S., Europe and China now bank6 online and in France more than 40 percent of online shoppers have purchased travel services over the Web.7 Online banking and online travel activities have disintermediated the humans who used to be the gatekeepers and guides to these services, but self-sufficiency and convenience are prime drivers for the consumer.

Online content9 purchases continue to be strong. According to a report issued by the Online Publishers Association, U.S. consumer spending on online content exceeded $1.3 billion in 2002. Some 14.2 million U.S. consumers paid for online content last year, up 43 percent. Yahoo was the leading U.S. destination for consumer content purchases, followed by Match.com—a dominance reflecting the large amounts of content aggregated by the top revenue generators. Annual subscriptions, interestingly, are the dominant pricing model, accounting for 41 percent of online content sales. The average price for monthly subscriptions online was $10.32.10 In a similar report also issued in 2003, Jupiter Research found paid content revenues in Western Europe to be 361 million Euros in 2002, projecting a rise to 2.366 billion Euros by 2007.11

The significance of all this activity taking place on the Internet is that, worldwide, the trend is an increasing comfort with Web-based information and content sources. The Information Consumer operates in an increasingly autonomous way, interacting not with institutions but with operations and activities: one does “online banking” not “goes to the bank.” Can’t remember what the address of your virtual bank is? No problem. “Google” it.12

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Google is not the only search engine. It isn’t the only one people use. But it is by far the most commonly used one. On September 7, 2003, Google turned five. It answers 200 million search requests a day in 88 languages.13 The Information Consumer searches Google to find old girlfriends, cars, scholarly papers presented at conferences, jokes about librarians, a quotation by William Gibson, the number of searches done on Google, e-mail addresses, the time in Helsinki and an image of Monet’s Waterlilies. And the odds are that the Information Consumer considers these searches successful.

“The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google’s top 10 results.”15

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