Ad Age: Web Access a Central Utility of Daily American Life
The new hearth
People now treat the Internet much like many do the television set, as a central household touch-point with the outside world. An ethnographic study of 23 American households by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) indicates that they consider the Internet much like other luxuries that are today considered necessities: indoor water, electricity and a TV set.
A quantitative side of the research, surveying about 25,000 people, showed that only 12 percent of respondents use a brand name site as their browser homepage, indicating both that Microsoft isn't doing a very good job at keeping people at the default MSN location and that users are much more comfortable changing their settings than they were just a few years ago, when homepages were often determined by pre-set defaults.
