First 24 hours on the Internet - A marketing perspective

Abstract

Real environments govern by societal rules, law, culture and set of assumptions. And there are law enforcement and other agencies to monitor and record the acts and behaviors of its residents and to make sure everything goes by the book. This paper introduces a tool that counts the presence of a person in the virtual environment (on the Internet) and examines the activities he/she conducts online. The tool is capable of answer questions like how “old” are you on the Internet? How soon will a newbie be exposed to adult websites? How long will it take for a new Internet user to know about social networking sites? And how many years a user has to surf online to celebrate his/her first “birthday” of Internet presence? Paper findings from a database of 105 school and university students containing their every click of first 24 hours of Internet usage are presented. The findings provide valuable insights for Internet Marketing, ethics, Internet business and the mapping of Internet life with real life. Privacy and ethical issues related to the study have been discussed at the end.