Being rich not only gets you the best cars, houses, luxuries, clothes, health care, insurance, entertainment, you also get more out of using the Internet. To put it bluntly when you are wealthier you tend to be more educated and therefore have a more specific reason for using the Internet. And some new research by Jupiter Research shows that rich Americans tend to search the Internet where the rest tend to surf. The simple definition here is that surfing is mindless reading of websites, random or not, to relieve boredom whereas search the Internet is to solve problems. So a good chuck of their time is focussed on business rather then pleasure.
Here’s a quote from the article, “ Speaking of social networking, it’s in with the upscale crowd. The Jupiter study found 43% of affluents use instant messaging, compared with 36% of people with lesser incomes. A full 26% of affluents read blogs and 11% are blog-authors. Among non-affluent people, those figures are 22% and 6%, respectively.”
This would certainly hold true in South Africa where the rich have been able to afford Internet access for much longer – and therefore has more experience online. When you have more experience on the Internet you get more out of it. In my online dating research I found that user experience improves dramatically after first 12 months.
