• English accounts for 32.5% of the Internet.
  
  
• There are 56 countries on the Net, and 259 million users.
  
  
• Americans account for 59 percent of the world's electronic mailboxes, 43 percent of Internet users and 54 percent of on-line buyers.
  
  
• Percent of adults who have bought online: US: 31%; Sweden: 21%, Switzerland: 19%; Canada: 18%; Australia: 14%; Germany: 14%; Japan: 13%.
  
  
• Number of users: US: 110,825,000; Japan: 18,156,000; Britain: 13,975,000.
  
  
• 67 percent of Americans 18 to 24 live in households that use the Internet to gather key information.
  
  
• 59 percent of young American adults say they get more useful information from the Internet than from newspapers.

Source: All Stats Directly Quoted FRom
"We've All Got Mail", Newsweek, May 15, 2000.

• "Each day, about half a million items are sold on eBay...nearly 50 million people around the world [use eBay].
  
  
• EBay users exchanged some $9.3 billion worth of goods in 18,000 categories [in nearly 170 million transactions last year]...Admittedly, this is only about 4 percent of Wal-Mart's $220 billion in sales last year- but Wal-Mart deploys a worldwide network of warehouses, more than 3,000 stores and 1.3 million workers.
  
  
• EBay got by with no stores, fewer than 3,000 employees and without taking legal or physical possession of [anything]...revenues from listing fees and advertising last year amounted to $749 million.
  
  
• 11 million items are for sale at any given time.
  
  
• EBay has 8.2 million unique visitors worldwide.
  
  
• EBay receives 200,000 queries [not all are fraud-related] per month; 70 percent are answered within 24 hours.
  
  
• One one-hundredth of 1 percent of all eBay listings result in a confirmed case of fraud...an estimated 900 fraudulent items on the site each day.

Source: All Stats Directly Quoted FRom
Jerry Adler, "The EBay Way of Life," Newsweek, June 17, 2002, pp. 50-57