Todd Hollander Market Research

As Internet penetration continues to grow, the demographics of adult Internet users in the U.S. continues to more closely resemble the population as a whole.

While older and lower-income Americans are still slightly underrepresented online, the gap appears to be narrowing. According to data from Harris Interactive, 8 percent of U.S. Internet users are age 65 or over (compared to 16 percent of all adults) and 14 percent have household incomes lower than $25,000 (compared to 19 percent of all adults).

This is good news for online marketing researchers, who continue to bolster internet surveys and the industry’s “gold standard” for data collection.

Results of a recent poll from Harris Interactive show that 178 million U.S. adults are using the Internet. That is a whopping 79 percent.

This is a dramatic increase from the 9% of U.S. adults who reported they went online when Harris first started tracking Internet use in 1995.

The number of adults accessing the internet from home has risen to 72%, up from 70% in 2006 and 66% in 2005.

The amount of time spent online has also continued to increase. Adult Americans are now spending an average of 11 hours per week online, up from 9 hours per week in 2006 and 8 hours in 2005.

With eight out of ten adults now online, and an ever increasing number of people discontinuing their use of landline telephones, web surveys have replaced telephone surveys as the market research industry’s method of choice.