~ EUROPEAN WWW USER PROFILES FROM GVU's 5th WWW USER SURVEY, MAY 1996 ~

BELGIUM, FRANCE AND HOLLAND

The collected data is copyrighted by the Georgia Tech Research Corporation under the following conditions. Source: European WWW User Profiles, June, 1996, by Erik Granered, URL:http://www.metamarketer.com/pub/granered/, from the European dataset of GVUs Fifth WWW User Survey, URL:http//www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys.

About the responses from Belgium, France and Holland

There was a total of 260 responses from this region -- the Netherlands (177), France (54), and Belgium (29). There was a slight increase in the number of women online during the past six months, up to 11 percent, compared with 8 percent for the 4th Surve y. The average age was 28.8.
Compared with GVU's 4th Survey, this region has seen a sharp drop in educational users, down to 35 percent from 44 percent 6 months ago.
While not exactly synonymous, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have similar connotations in most areas of Europe. It is possible, given the educational level of most Web users, that many respondents answered the question understanding the Americ an definitions of the terms. The survey question did not give any such definitions, however. Overall, 18.1 percent of Europeans answered this question either "other" (7.24%) "not_say" (4.88%) or don't_know" (5.98%).
An unusually large percentage of Web users in this region use Unix as their main computing platform, 16 percent compared to 12 percent in Europe overall and only 4.4 percent in the U.S..
Overall Europe has more users in the lower income brackets, with 31.6 percent making more than $50,000. In this region, 33 percent of Web users make more than $50,000 and 51 percent make less than 50,000.
This question was changed for the 5th GVU Survey, so it is difficult to compare the results. In general, Europeans are less resistant to paying for Web page access than Americans, perhaps because Europeans often access the Web via business or educati onal institutions. This eliminates the double payment which occurs with people who pay for their home access to the Internet.