Internet Usage Reached to the Mature Stage in South Korea
Internet Use Rate 71.9%, Internet Users 32.57 millions

August 10 , 2005

'Survey on the Computer and Internet Usage' conducted by NIDA(National Internet Development Agency of Korea) in June. 2005 shows that Internet usage in Korea has reached to the mature and stable stage. For the users' distribution by age, most of all aged 10's and 20's use Internet, and the Internet use rate in the aged 30's is more than 90%. The use rate of the aged 40's and older who relatively belong to the underprivileged groups has dramatically grown and Internet activities of those also diversify to the wide area of Internet services.

As of June 2005, 71.9% (32.57 millions) of all Koreans aged 6 and older use the wired or wireless Internet more than once in the last month (±0.62% sampling error, 95% confidential level). Those have increased by 3.7%p (1.96 millions) respectively from the previous year, June 2004.

For the Internet use rate by age, Internet use rate among ages 6 to 19 is the highest with 97.3%, followed by 97.2% for 20's, 89.8% for 30's. Those of 40's and 50's are 67.2% and 34.7% which have increased substantially by 8.9%p and 7.1%p respectively from the previous year. These data show that Internet use has been disseminated into all aged groups.

For the Internet use rate by gender, 77.4% of all males (17.53million) and 66.3% of all females (15.04million) use the Internet, which shows that the use rate of males is higher than that of females by 11.3p% . However, the divide in the component ratio of Internet users by gender has gradually narrowed.

For the Internet use rate by occupations, Internet use rate of students is the highest with 98.0%, followed by white-collars (93.0%), professional/managers (92.5%). However, Internet use rates have dramatically grown among workers in production (45.8%, 9.4%p increase), house wives (57.1%, 5.2%p increase), service/sales (67.2%, 40%p) which have relatively low use rates.

For the major timeline using the Internet, workers mainly use it during weekdays ( 2.1 hours on the daily average basis) and students use it on weekends/holidays(2.0 hours on the daily average basis). Workers particularly use the Internet during office hours on weekdays (29.2% from 14 to 15 o'clock) and after works (31.6% from 21 to 22 o'clock). Students use it mainly in the evening on weekdays (29.3% from 21 to 22 o'clock) and afternoon in holidays (33.5% from 15 to 16 o'clock) when they have no classes.

In the aspect of communication on the Internet, 88.9% of Internet users have e-mail accounts ( 1.7 accounts on average) and 44.2% of them use the messenger service(6.4 hours on average). Moreover, Blog(Minihompy) users (41.3% of Internet users) spend 4.3 hours on their own blogs and connect 9.8 times to them on average, and they also spend 3.0 hours on others' blogs and connect to them 13.6 times.

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