Women surfing practical

Online shopping, info sites and electronic mail support everyday lifeBy Markus KnöpfliIn March, 173,000 more Swiss people used the Internet than in February (plus 9 percent). Of these new users, more than half were women. This had hardly any influence on the ranking of the top 20 domains.
In March 2001, a total of 2.195 (February: 2.012) million people used the Internet from home on an average of 10.5 (9.5) days. On an average day, 738,000 (68,000,000) visitors spent 33 (33) minutes online and accessed an average of 27 (27) pages.
The ranking of the top 20 domains (Switzerland as a whole) remained broadly stable, at least in the top seven places. Google.com, which jumped from nowhere to 11th place in February, has now moved up to 8th place, probably at the expense of Altavista.com, which dropped from 9th to 13th place. Net scape.com also had to give up its place and dropped out, replaced by Microsoft.de, which occupied 14th place in January and dropped out in February.
So while the total number of home Internet users increased by just under 9 percent in March compared to February, the proportion of female surfers aged 15 and over rose from 35.8 to 38 percent (from 724000 to 834000 women).
The fact that women use the Internet primarily for practical everyday things is shown by the hit list of the site with the highest proportion of women. In first place is the online offering of the mail-order company Quelle, which is also the e-commerce site with the strongest sales in Germany after Amazon.de, Otto and Ebay (88.8 million deutschmarks).
But the real estate site Immopool.ch and the travel site Kuoni.ch also attract more women than men. In 4th to 7th place are electronic greetings (bluemountain. com) and e-commerce offerings such as the supermarket le-shop.ch. Internationally, too, female surfers are specifically looking for information on the Net: the British woman obtains information about health from nhs.uk, the website with a female share of just under 70 percent, while the French woman browses for the latest fashions at Redoute.fr.
Internet usage: different values from Wemf and MMXI

According to Wemf's MA Comis (August 2000), the surfing Swiss spend two hours a day on the Net, 70 minutes of which are spent at home. According to the MMXI Switzerland Internet panel, however, the Swiss surf for only about 33 minutes on their home PCs.
Which is true now? Possibly both. Both Wemf marketing manager Gabriela Eggstein and Public Data managing director Rolf Müller (PD markets the MMXI data) confirm this: The difference is essentially due to different survey methods and definitions: MMXI measures electronically, while MA Comis interviews people. In addition, MA Comis also counts writing and reading an e-mail as Internet use, even if this is often done offline at home for reasons of economy. MMXI, on the other hand, only reports time actually spent online as Internet usage.
Where women prefer to surf (all of Switzerland)

Rank Domain Share Women
from 15 years
 1 Source.ch 58.5
 2 immopool.ch 57.0
 3 kuoni.ch 54.0
 4 bluemountain.com 52.8
 5 bol.com 51.8
 6 infowing.ch 51.8
 7 yahoo.ch 51.4
 8 excite.de 51.3
 9 le-shop.ch 51.0
10 swissclick.ch 49.4
Source: MMXI Europe Switzerland, Zurich, March Report