Teens not frequent visitors at cyber cafes: IDC India

BANGALORE: An IDC India study conducted on the mushrooming cyber cafes in the

country has revealed that contrary to popular belief, teenagers are not the most

frequent users of the Internet at cyber cafes. The study, IDC’s latest

offering from its Internet Research program, says a majority of cyber cafe users

are in the 19- to 25-year age group. Next to them, these centers are most

popular among people aged between 26 and 35 years. Together, the most frequent

visitors of cyber cafes were college students, businessmen and executives.

The main objective of the study was to profile the cyber cafe visitors based

on various relevant parameters. It was observed that cyber cafe visitors were

generally from an affluent background. The study covered about 645 cyber cafe

visitors across 30 cafes in five cities, which included the four metros plus

Bangalore.

The study revealed that, although 70 per cent of the cafe visitors said they

were aware of Internet commerce, only seven per cent had actually made any

purchases over the Net. The most popular items of purchase over the Internet are

CDs and books. As far as activities at cyber cafes were concerned, ‘e-mail’

and ‘chat’ were overwhelmingly popular, with a share of 53 per cent and 23

per cent respectively.

The study found that the average Internet surfing time among these visitors

was about 1.2 hours, with Delhi registering the highest (1.7 hours) and

Bangalore the lowest (0.8 hours). IDC India also captured the average spending

by cyber cafe users on various media such as television, newspapers, magazines,

recorded music and cyber cafes among others. The study revealed that in a month,

cyber café visitors spent on an average a third of their total infotainment

expenditure at these browsing centers.