I am pro web based personalisation because I believe that it has the ability to deliver dynamic, customised, and relevant content to the website visitor, through the visitor’s web page or email.

Personalisation finds and delivers information to the consumer that goes beyond the use of search engines, whereby users need to know what they are looking for, but studies show that just 2% of what users actually know comes from a direct search; the rest comes through passive means, by monitoring our environments, browsing and staying aware.

How does personalisation benefit the retailer and the consumer?

Typically what we see on the web for personalisation is a technology called collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering depends heavily upon user ratings and users going around and rating different things, especially on ecommerce websites such as Amazon.  

Amazon uses the collaborative filtering techniques; cross-selling and up-selling, in order to deliver personalised content to the customer. Cross-sell models predict the probability or value of a current customer buying a different product or service from the same company (cross-sell). Up-sell models predict the probability or value of a customer buying more of the same products or services.

On Amazon, the personalisation starts for me as soon as I have signed in to the website. Under the “Today’s Recommendations For You” area of my personalised homepage, I clicked the product in the “New for You” area which was the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

Amazon.co.uk-Recommended For You

Below is the collaborative filtering/data mining techniques that I see after I have scrolled down the page.

Amazon.co.uk-Up-selling and cross-selling

The up-selling technique used displays a second product, Microsoft Office 2007 that Amazon believes will compliment the product that I am interested in buying. If I actually wanted to buy both items, this system benefits me, as the consumer, by eliminating the repetitive task of going through the purchasing and transaction process twice. It also suggests a product that I am interested in buying, that I might not have actively thought about buying until I saw it appear beside the original item. For the retailer they gain an extra sale, where they would otherwise have only made the one sale.

The cross-selling technique used tells me what percent of other Amazon users bought this item after viewing it, which gives me two other versions of the operating system along with the currently viewed item and Microsoft Office 2007, which was used in the up-selling technique above. This model gives me, the consumer, similar products of interest which I might want to buy instead, or that I just want to use to compare against. For the retailer this may result in the sale of another product that the user may not have otherwise even looked at had they decided not to buy the original item that was being viewed.

With collaborative filtering, the recommender is not able to handle items until they have been ranked by a minimum number of customers; furthermore, the recommendation capabilities are poor if the medium storing the product ranks is fairly bare, because in that case it is difficult to identify customers having tastes similar to those of the current one. To overcome these issues personalisation is being innovated a lot further from what collaborative filtering has done.

The next generation of personalisation uses a behavioural model, because it’s not what user says that’s important; it’s what they do that matters.

Next Generation Personalisation

Humans do not make decisions without knowledge or input. We influence each other and are influenced by the groups, communities, and networks in which we participate. Every decision we make affects our own personal experiences as well as the experiences of those around us. Next generation personalisation uses this idea to drive the importance of socialisation in personalisation in our networks.

Technology should not finish at the interface layer; it should be pushed forward so that consumers have great online experiences. The interface should support the technology with more information about consumer behaviour. This is the feedback loop being utilised by the creators of the next generation of personalised content delivery platforms.

It is the next generation of personalisation engines which I am in favour of more so.

Web 3.0 is about recommendation and personalisation

The top entry for the keywords was; “cheap flights to Canada” which received an average of, 12,000 searches each month in the USA, with a strong degree of competitiveness for ad placement, an estimated bid amount of $1.42, which may place the ad in the top three spots of the Google results page in the USA, and the page on the website that best matched the keyword suggestion was the homepage; priceline.com.

Keyword Ideas for priceline.com

As my task is to try to cut down the deluge of key words to around twelve key phrases that perfectly describe the web site that could be used as part of an Adwords campaign, I am going to use more Google tools.

I used the Google Insights Search tool, which found popular searches, and also suggested top searches and rising searches related to a word or phrase.

I entered the maximum number of search terms into Google Insights (five) that were as follows; “cheap flights”, “cheap flight”, “cheap plane ticket”, “cheap plane tickets” and “discount flights”. The reason for entering in similar phrases such as cheap plane ticket and cheap plane tickets was to find out how much of a difference the plural of a word had.

I filtered the geographical area to the “United States”, because this is the area that priceline.com operate in, the date range to “2009”, to find out current key phrases being used and the category to “Travel” because Priceline is a travel related website.

Google Insights - Web Search Interest for "cheap flights"

The coloured “Totals” bars above represent the averages for each line on the graph. The “Interest level” for “cheap flights” was very high in comparison to both; its plural which had a total of nine searches, and to the other search terms of which none made it above ten searches.

The Regional Interest bar chart below showed that the Internet Users in Florida had the highest number of searches for “cheap flights” of 100, which is not an absolute search volume number because Google normalises and presents the data on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point or 100.

Google Insights - Regional Interest for "cheap flights"

Google Insights then gave the related search categories; “Top searches” and Rising searches”. “Top Searches” listed key phrases related to the search terms that I had entered and Rising Searches listed searches that have experienced significant growth in the period of time that I had specified, with respect to the preceding time period.

From the top searches I can see that, not only does the plural of a word matter when searching, but the ordering of words, the exclusion of a word from a key phrase (“cheap airlines” has five more searches than just “airlines”) and also the geographic location specified (the fifth and tenth search terms refer to a low-cost American airline) can produce significantly different results.

Google Insights - Related Search terms for "cheap flights"

The final Google based tool that I used was; Google Keyword Tool, which I found to be the most helpful and useful tool.

I entered the web page URL; http://www.priceline.com and the tool generated relevant keywords based on the text found on the web page, tailored to the United States.

This tool was useful in that it automatically gave keyword groupings for each of the terms. I sorted the results by the different “Match Type” and came to the conclusion that I should use “Exact” due to the fact that I was looking for 12 unique phrases and this option would give me a clearer idea of the search volumes for each keyword.

Google Keyword Tool - Keyword Groupings

I took note of about 15 key phrases that had the highest search volumes’ when taking into account both the Local and Global Search Volume categories, including the keyword “priceline” because it received 1,000,000 local searches and 1,220,000 global searches.

Finally I used KeywordSpy.co.uk, a website that amongst other things monitors the real-time tracking of a website’s keywords in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The “Organic Keywords” results displayed general travel based terms related to priceline.com whereas the PPC keywords displayed keywords related to the United States area, such as the number one search result “parking phoenix airport”.

KeyWord Spy - Organic Keywords

From using Keyword Spy and the Google Based tools I have decided on  twelve key phrases that perfectly describe the web site and that could be used as part of an Adwords campaign, that are in order of relevance as follows:

1. Hotels, 2. Hotel, 3. Priceline, 4. Travel, 5. Flights 6. Car rental, 7. Last minute, 8. Cheap, 9. Travel deals, 10. Cheap airline tickets, 11. Cheap hotels, 12. Cruise

When I typed the word “Priceline” into the Google Search engine, the US Priceline website, www.priceline.com is the first entry that is displayed in the results, as well as a “Sponsored Link” that was displayed just above the first result. The first search entry and other results that are displayed with other pages from the Priceline website are not paid for by Priceline or any other website that is displayed on Google’s search results. These results appear in Google because Google thought that it was a web page with relevance to the user’s search criteria.

Google Adwords

However, as I am using the search engine in the UK, Priceline’s “Sponsored Link” is for their UK website; www.priceline.co.uk. If a search engine user in the US was conducting a search, web pages from the US Priceline website would be displayed. 

This product that Priceline have subscribed to is Google’s advertising model, known as Google Adwords. This product offers a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system in which Priceline pay Google when their advertisement or link, is clicked. “Sponsored link” ads contain a title, a short description and a web address (URL).

The advertiser, who in this case would be the Priceline marketing team decide which queries’ that their ads should match, and then Google decides on which ads to show and the order of each individual ad. Google uses an auction model to determine ad placement but it also takes into account the click-through rate, which is how often users click an ad. If the Priceline ad were to be clicked-through to on a high number of occasions, Google will move the ad higher up the results page.

The Three Steps for AdWords

Competitors, Hotwire.com appear on the other sponsored link area on the right hand side along with two other; price conscious, travel related websites. This is because Google aims to deliver ads that it has identified as useful to the word/s that the User has entered into the search field. When I searched a number of travel related words into Google, I saw the Hotwire sponsored link appearing at the top on a high number of occasions which shows that they have invested heavily in this form of advertising.

Priceline uses meta keywords within its website but Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking so this may be one of the reasons that Priceline are using the Google Adwords model.

Using the AdQuants website, (www.adquants.com), a site that monitors online advertising and E-Marketing, I was able to find relevant information that was compiled on June 2009 on how the keywords advertising was used.

Firstly, the summary report for Priceline showed that the US website had the greatest number of its ads with Google (19,354), followed by 3,400 with Yahoo and just 30 with Microsoft adCenter, which appear on Microsoft’s’ Bing search engine.

This shows that Priceline are predominantly using Google as the search engine that they want to focus their advertising on with focus placed to a lesser extent on the Yahoo and Bing search engines.

The Google Advertisement report displayed below shows that keywords such as; orange park, arco arena, and huron had good Ad rankings of 3, 3 and 2 respectively. This is the order in which the ads were displayed on the results page. The keyword “Huron”, which is the name of one of the five Great Lakes of North America, received an average of 18 daily clicks costing Priceline, on average, $0.05 in daily Cost-per-click advertising with an average spend of $1 a day on advertising of this keyword.

Google Advertisement Report for priceline.com

I think that the adwords system is benefitting Priceline because they are spending a very small amount of money (1 pound) on the cost-per-click, which brings in potential new customers as well as customer bookings. Priceline already appear in the Google search results when words like “Priceline” and “Name Your Own Price” are entered but with Google AdWords they are able to target a new audience, who may not have been directly looking to book flights or accommodation etc. with the company.

Cloud Computing is the meeting and unification of three key developments:

1. Virtualisation, where applications are separated from the infrastructure.
2. Utility Computing, where server capacity is accessed across a grid as a variably priced shared service.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS), where applications are available on demand, on a subscription basis.

As Broadband has got cheaper over the years, technologists realised that not everybody had to build in house data centres. Essentially they realised that the Computer running the application could be any distance from the User and only a fast connection was needed between the two. This led to Software as a Service (SaaS), which consisted of large, fast machines in someone else’s data centre running an application that the User accesses using their web browser. Someone else owns the application and the User pays a fixed subscription fee.

The advantage of this is that the User doesn’t have to worry about the machines running the application because it doesn’t belong to them. Also, the User does not have to apply time and resources to developing and maintaining an application that they are not experienced in using.

However this one way approach didn’t work for large businesses with complex requirements. Some of the businesses didn’t like the idea of data outside of their firewall. They also didn’t like the the subscription model where the business paid a set rate that didn’t depend on their usage. What big businesses wanted was the convenience and accessibility of SaaS with the flexibility of traditional computing; a mixture that allowed any software to be easily run as a service in a data centre, that someone else owns and manages. However applications were very difficult to deploy in a new environment.

This is where Virtualisation came in. With virtualisation, applications were independent allowing for servers to be easily shared by many applications and those applications to run virtually anywhere. That is as long as the application is virtualised. This self contained unit; a virtualised application can run anywhere. If it can run anywhere, it doesn’t necessarily have to run in a company’s data centre or in the application provider’s data centre, it can run in the cloud. The cloud is the computing service that charges the User based only on the amount of Computer resources that they use. This Pay-As-You-Go feature is a major characteristic of Cloud Computing and one of the things that sets it apart from SaaS.

I think that E-commerce businesses should adopt cloud computing as opposed to paying up front for  traditional licensed software, where for a fixed price you get a package that includes support, extended warranty etc. whether you use it or not.

With SaaS the User can’t make any significant changes to the software because it doesn’t really belong to them. The User pays the same amount monthly and they’re guaranteed a certain level of service. With Cloud Computing, the User only pays by how much they use and they don’t pay for maintenance or support. The driving force of Cloud Computing has been the implementation virtualisation because applications can’t be deployed to the cloud without it.

In this tough economic climate I think that Cloud Computing has become even more attractive to e-commerce companies than before. With Cloud, the e-commerce company does not need to pay for more Computing capacity than they need, when they can pay only for what they use.

Supply chain Management (SCM) is the coordination of the supply activities of an organisation, like Priceline, from its suppliers and partners (airlines, hotels, car hire companies) to its customers.

By sharing SCM data with a company’s suppliers (upstream supply chain) and with a company’s clients (downstream supply chain), SCM applications have the potential to improve the time-to-market of products, reduce costs, and allow all parties in the supply chain to better manage current resources and plan for future needs.

Push vs pull supply models

As Priceline operates on the C2B market, they use a ‘pull’ supply model where the emphasis is on delivering value  to customers who want to change something in order to enhance the product and service quality that they are receiving. In this system, the consumer requests the product and “pulls” it through the delivery channel. For example, in Priceline, the customer is actively involved in specifying their request for airline tickets, hotel accommodation and car rentals by bidding (at a price of their choice), giving the option to the airline/hotel/car rental company to accept or reject the price offered.

Vertical integration vs disintegration vs virtual integration

Priceline manages its supply chains using virtual integration, because they are completely reliant on the travel-service companies. Without the travel service providers Priceline would not have a commercial business, so they have a close relationship with the airline/hotel/car rental companies.

Their approach to business is that of rapid market penetration, a characteristic of the dot-com company. This marketing strategy involves offering travel services at an initially low price to familiarise the public with their name and brand. For the penetration strategy to be effective the travel market will have to be large enough to sustain low profit margins.

Evidence of value networks

The partnership Priceline has with its network of travel service providers is extremely important to the business. The price that the airline/hotel/car rental company sets for their individual services ultimately determines what mark-up Priceline will sell it onto the customer at. If Pricelines’ network of travel service providers deliver reasonable prices, this will allow Priceline to do a greater amount of business than if the travel service providers over-value the service that they are providing.

Evidence of efficiencies in supply chain

The efficiencies in the supply chain of Priceline are evident in that as an e-commerce website they have applied Information Systems (IS) to the supply chain management (SCM) to increase efficiency.

Priceline have replaced faxing and letters with e-mail which would be used to confirm a customer’s travel booking. This improved method of data integration between elements of the supply chain has the benefit of reduced cost of paper processing.

Priceline have the opportunity to improve the innovations of their website with similar systems to the Name Your Own Price system, where the customer specifies a price and a product and/or service, and asks sellers to match that combination. This system was the stepping stone to  Priceline gaining prominence within the travel industry. More innovations like this would result in better customer responsiveness and an enhanced browsing experience.

The threat of substitute products and services

With Priceline operating quite successfully on the C2B market it is no surprise that new competitors have entered this market offering a slightly different service or offering an alternative purchasing system. Other online travel agencies, like Expedia, and Travelocity are also adding to the competition Priceline faces, with new technological developments and great deals.

Priceline must monitor the activity of the competition and keep ahead of the game by matching or bettering their rivals with regard to; prices, customer service and the overall booking experience. For example, if the Orbitz website is seen to have a simpler and easier travel booking process, then Priceline must look to develop their website, using better technology to make it more User-friendly and accessible to the Customer.

The threat of the entry of new competitors (barriers to entry)

Priceline is an online travel service, viewable on the World Wide Web (WWW) making it easier to imitate, than brick and mortar businesses for example.

New entrants to the market should be monitored by Priceline to make sure that they are not breaking any rules with regard to how their business operates and their relationships with airlines, hotels etc. For example before Orbitz site began operating, some competitors and consumer organisations were trying to put up barriers to prevent them coming into the market due to antitrust concerns because their project is a collaboration with five of the six major airlines. Threats like this in the future could prove to be a real threat to Priceline’s online business and may require Priceline to spend significant amounts of money in legal costs to prevent this from happening.

The intensity of competitive rivalry

Intense competitive rivalry can pressure businesses into trying to better each other for value. Where a travel service becomes less differentiated, the customer will care more about the price than who they are buying the service from. This reduces the pricing power of the producer.

Priceline has to engage in the intense rivalry with competitors by having a “Best Price Guarantee” that is better than its competitors price assurances. It also must make sure that customers can save a percentage similar or better to their rivals, for example if Hotwire offer up to 45% of airfares then Priceline most follow suit or better that offer.

The bargaining power of customers/buyers

Today, online buyers have become savvier in their Internet dealings due to a wider choice of travel services that can be found through search engines such as Google. Prices can be compared using price comparison websites like travelsupermarket.com and customer knowledge has been increased through online forums such as betterbidding.com where Users can share tips on using Priceline and Hotwire, and share their experiences of both websites.

When a potential customer registers with Priceline, the company can create a relationship with the customer through their profile where the User can set their travel preferences and members can enjoy rewards such as discounts added to their account following their first purchase leading to ‘soft lock-in’.

The bargaining power of suppliers

The relationship Priceline have with the airlines, hotels, car hire companies etc. is important to the final price that they will offer Priceline’s customers through priceline.com.

It is vital that Priceline create relationships and partners in the travel industry like the relationship Orbitz have been granted with five of the six major airlines, as mentioned above. Priceline has made a number of acquisitions, in an attempt to gain a competitive streak and get repeat business from a supplier. These acquisitions include online hotel reservation companies, Agoda.com, an online hotel reservations service specialising in securing the lowest discount hotel prices in Asia Pacific, and Active Hotels, one of Europe’s leading online hotel reservation companies.

Priceline and its main “opaque travel-service” competitor, Hotwire won’t publish full flight information until after a customer has committed a credit card. Unlike Priceline, Hotwire publishes prices. However they still don’t reveal what flight you’re on.

Because Hotwire publishes its fares, it takes the uncertainty out of the process, but on the whole I think that Priceline has better rates available on travel services than Hotwire.

 Q.8. Priceline.com uses one of the most advanced, sophisticated technologies to ensure that the data the customer sends remains absolutely confidential and secure. The website uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) technology to encrypt all personal information, including the Customers’ name, address, and credit card number/social security number to prevent it from being read during transmission over the Internet. These hardware and software systems work together to protect their customer’s privacy at all times.

GeoTrust is a large digital certificate provider.

Also, as mentioned in Week 3, The Hotel booking process on the Priceline website is secured by GeoTrust. GeoTrust is a large digital certificate provider. The digital certificates enable Priceline to secure e-business transactions and validate website identities, instilling confidence in consumers to boost online sales.

Priceline are committed to protecting the customer’s privacy and take their responsibilities regarding the security of credit card information very seriously. Credit card information is sent via a certified secure server which encrypts all customer details so that credit or debit card information cannot be read by anyone else.

Q.9. Priceline state on their website that they may use site tracking software to protect the security of their site, monitor usage and traffic patterns, and to assist with the design and development of priceline.com.

Priceline also uses “cookies” to enable the company to display the website in the User’s preferred language and measure the proportion of bookings that come from customers who have previously booked with Priceline.

Priceline cookies in Firefox

Many e-commerce websites use cookies to register customer’s preferences. Cookies are a system whereby a message is given to the Users’ web browser by the Priceline web server. This text message is stored by the Users’ browser. Each time the browser requests a page from the server, this text message is sent back.

A cookie’s main objective is to allow the Priceline server to identify visitors to the website and gives them the opportunity to tailor the site to the Users’ needs. For example, if the User chooses to view the site in French, Priceline may set a “cookie” on their machine so that the next time they return to the site, it is automatically shown in French. The User may disable cookies by setting their browser accordingly. However according to Priceline, if the User chooses not to accept cookies, they may have a less satisfactory experience on the site.

I visited alexa.com, a website that compute’s traffic ranking by analysing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. I was able to use alexa.com to place priceline.com in context by comparing it with online travel website competitors; expedia.com, hotwire.com and orbitz.com.

Priceline had a similar page rank to Orbitz over the three months

The graph and information above shows that priceline.com was placed at 764 over the last three months. Priceline’s traffic ranking compared fairly well to fellow discount travel services, hotwire.com (1,716) and orbitz.com (749), who operate under a similar business model to Priceline. Internet-based travel reservation website, expedia.com had the highest traffic ranking (386) and was the best performer overall across the traffic stats.

Using AttentionMeter.com on the Compete.com tab, I was able to find the number of unique visitors to priceline.com and also to its competitors. The graph below shows that Priceline’s number of unique hits had increased from around 7.5 million per month in 2008 to just over 10 million per month in 2009. This is a significant increase that has resulted in Priceline rising above discount travel competitor, Orbitz, since Marchl 2009 til present August 2009.

Q.5. To book a hotel on priceline Users will go through a step-by-step process as follows:

1. Enter http://www.priceline.com into the address bar to access the website. You have the choice of reserving a hotel room at the listed price, or making an offer on the hotel. To make an offer, click “hotels” at the top of your screen on the Priceline web site and then “bid now”.

2. Fill in the city, state, date and number of rooms. Then locate the hotel area, star level and price. Enter your credit card information, initial the box on Priceline as your signature and wait for an answer.

GeoTrust is a large digital certificate provider.

The Hotel booking process on the priceline.co.uk website is secured by GeoTrust. GeoTrust is a large digital certificate provider. The digital certificates enable Priceline to secure e-business transactions and validate website identities, instilling confidence in consumers to boost online sales.

Priceline are committed to protecting the customer’s privacy and take their responsibilities regarding the security of credit card information very seriously. Credit card information is sent via a certified secure server which encrypts all customer details so that credit or debit card information cannot be read by anyone else.

3. Look at the screen once Priceline has processed the information or check your email to verify your offer was accepted before you proceed any further. This may take a few minutes. This step is very important as it can prevent double-booking when you use Priceline.

4. View your hotel reservation if your price was accepted, and print out the confirmation of your hotel booking. The money will then be deposited from your account.

Q.6. In 2008 Priceline.com launched http://www.priceline.mobi, a mobile version of their website. Here Users can search for hotels, book travel reservations, check flight status, and access Zagat-rated restaurants and attractions. Mobile web Users also have the opportunity to download;  wallpapers, ringtones and TV commercials starring the “Negotiator”, William Shatner.

This mobile site was developed for Priceline’s shop and to compare products, however bidding is currently not permitted. Above I mentioned that Users can “book travel reservations” but it is not that simple. Priceline actually provide a telephone number to make the booking for the hotel rooms, air & hotel packages and cruises.

I think that Priceline mobile has huge potential to have a massive effect on their overall business. However for this to happen Priceline need to implement a strategy where Users are able to bid on travel services through their mobile handsets like they would on their Computer at home, instead of having to call a telephone number to book. This would increase the number of Users using the website and more transactions may take place from User’s on the move.

Priceline is one of the leading companies that created the C2B (Consumer-to-business) market, in which passengers could bid for airline tickets, hotel accommodation and car rentals, at a price of their choice. The airline/hotel/car rental company then have the option to accept or reject the bid. Since the company began in April 1998, offering airline tickets on discount, it has experimenting quite successfully with this business model.

Priceline are floating on the American Stock exchange, NASDAQ, under the abbreviation PCL N. Their yearly annual income statement can be summarised as follows:

On 31/12/2005 their total revenue was $962,660 and their gross profit was $267,863. Their net income (or bottom line) was $193,473.

On 31/12/2006 their total revenue was $1,123,103 and their gross profit was $401,099. Their net income was $157,082.

On 31/12/2007 their total revenue was $1,409,409 and their gross profit was $639,412. Their net income was $74,466.

On 31/12/2008 their total revenue was $1,884,806 and their gross profit was $955,971. Their net income was $192,729.

At the time of typing (01/10/09) the exchange rate is; 1.00 USD = 0.62 GBP. Priceline have continued to make a profit year over the last four years, although their net income is substantially lower than online competitor’s, Expedia.co.uk,  who have a bottom line in and around the $250,000 mark each year and a far greater gross profit averaging at just under 2 million USD between 2005 and 2008.

The Internet is the only channel for marketing the Priceline business because it is solely an online auction business. Priceline, one of the first big Internet start-ups, was the idea of venture capitalist Jesse Fink and of digital entrepreneur Jay Walker; the company’s origins were closely tied with Walker’s company Walker Digital.

Below is a channel chain map for consumers shopping for discount travel using Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” system.

I searched Google and found a PDF document published by Eurostat in November 2008 on Internet Usage across the 27 EU member states. I was able to find some detailed information on the Internet usage of UK households and individuals between 2006 and 2008.

Research carried out by Eurostat showed that between 2006 and 2008 Internet usage in UK households grew from 63% to 71%, an 8% rise over the two years. Households in the UK with a Broadband Internet connection rose by 18%, with 62% of households having a Broadband Internet connection in 2008, while just 44% had Broadband in 2006.

There are now millions of households in the UK with a Broadband Internet connection

These statistics showed a steady rise in the number of households that had Internet access and quite a sizeable increase in the number of households who used a Broadband Internet connection.

Individuals were given a range of Internet usage activities and asked which activities that they had used in the last three months of 2008. The two most popular activities were to use the Internet to “order/buy goods or services for private use” and, “use services related to travel and accommodation” which polled 49% and 48% respectively.

In comparison to other EU countries the UK had a large number of online Users in 2006 and in 2008. The statistics above show a continual growth in UK Internet Users that will no doubt increase in the coming years.

What these figures do not take into account is the number of individual Users in the UK with mobile Internet access. I believe that in the future this technology will further increase the number of online Users in the UK, who are now accessing the Internet via their handsets.