Even if the year 2000 didn't mark the true start of the third millennium, the year's numerical novelty -- all those pretty zeroes -- seemed to have made it a good time to start new things.
Some learned how to blow smoke rings, others took to street luge, and still others learned macramé.
But there was one marginal hobby that seemed to have been pretty popular in 2000: signing up for an Internet connection you really don't use all that often.
According to Nielsen/Netratings' most recent report of online access in the United States, about 35 million people came online in the year 2000, bringing the total U.S. wired population to almost 154 million.
But as more people bought passes to ride the information superhighway, many fewer actually traveled down the thing with any regularity, says Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services at Nielsen/Netratings.
"When we ask how many people have logged on in the past month, about four out of 10 say that they had not. And this number stayed fairly constant throughout the year," Weiner said.
In November, for example, Netratings found that 153,844,012 had access to the Internet at home. But only 95,353,868, or 62 percent, had used the Net during that month.
"As we see more and more people coming online, it's a little bit misleading," Weiner said. "Because we see that active usage is pretty much staying the same."
Weiner suspects that people are getting attracted to the idea of the Internet from all the hype, but that once they've actually managed to browse over to their first website, they get discouraged.
"People aren't finding anything of extreme value," he said, "and a lot of it has to do with speed. It isn't like TV -- that's faster, more dependable."
Of course, this analysis -- that millions of people have accounts they aren't using -- begs a pretty logical question: Why are these masses wasting 20 bucks each month?
"It's the old health club model," Weiner concluded. "It takes too much effort to disconnect it, and they might think -- and my hunch is the same -- that over time, they might be lured back online, when it gets faster, or there's more on there for them."
If Weiner's suspicion is true, and if almost half the people with Internet access aren't liking what they're seeing, that doesn't bode well for Internet companies seeking to attract ever bigger audiences, regardless of the Fed's interest rate.
What's important to remember, though, is that when it comes to Internet traffic monitoring, the governing paradigm seems to be: Don't jump to conclusions. As one surveyor described such measurements, the numbers are all "fuzzy" at best.
That isn't to say that Netratings' numbers are wrong. Media Metrix, a competing research firm, clocks its November "digital universe" -- the number of people who've logged on at least once during the month -- at around 80 million, which isn't really so far off, as these things go, from Netrating's 95 million.
Shum Preston, a spokesman for Media Metrix, said that the firm didn't track total Internet access, but he said that an October Department of Commerce number -- 116.5 million -- was probably a good snapshot.
Those numbers -- 80 million logging on, 116.5 million with access -- yield a usage rate of 69 percent. These figures, again, as these things go, aren't really far from Nielsen's 62 percent rate.
But Preston went on to say that on average, people are spending more time, not less, online. "Days online, minutes online -- the trend is up," he said.
Preston also said that a more accurate way of finding out whether people are paying for service without using it is to ask Internet service providers. But several major ISPs contacted by Wired News either did not return calls or said that the necessary numbers would be impossible to calculate with any great speed.
So what of Weiner's conclusions? At best, said a couple traffic analysts, they're hard to prove.
"What we do know about is free ISPs -- they have a surprisingly low usage rate," said Forrester analyst Jed Kolko. He was referring to companies such as NetZero, which offer free access to the Internet as long as users agree to leave an advertisement window open on their desktops.
"Even though 40 percent of online households had signed on for a free ISP, only one-third of them used it recently." Kolko said. "They use other accounts."
Brian Smith, research director at Gartner, sounded a similar note of caution -- to count multiple accounts might trip people up.
"You have to ask, 'Are these people logging on somewhere else?'" he said. "My suspicion would be that people who have Internet access at home would do a lot of their work at the office."
And that, Smith said, could lead to some kind of miscount. "There may be some kind of statistical artifact," Smith said.
When asked whether they were aware of the particular phenomenon of people paying for service they weren't using, both Smith and Kolko said that they didn't think it was occurring.
And both said their research showed that new Internet users weren't turned off by what they found online.
"We're finding that the new users are very adventurous," Smith said. "We do notice that within the first couple of months of logging on for the first time, users tend to go to many sites. After awhile, their use tends to be more scripted."
But Smith did agree with Weiner's idea that when broadband is brought to the masses, Internet usage will rise dramatically.
"Right now, the Internet is a 'lean-forward' medium -- meaning, you have to do some work to enjoy it," he said. "It's not like TV, where I can lean back to enjoy it."
And when that changes, Smith said, the 40 percent -- whether they're really out there, or just statistics -- might come back to the Net.
