Cabo San Lucas, Baja California --

According to a recent survey conducted by an inter-departmental research group at the University of Cabo, the commercial online services contribute no more than 2% of all World Wide Web traffic.

The results showed that more than 50% of all WWW activity consists of website creators looking for the newest, coolest ways to paper-over their own pages' content vacuum, while an additional 35% of all hits come from web search robots, worms, crawlers, etc.

"We used to think there were actual people on the web because of all the hits everybody was claiming," said Chip Myshkin, a Sociology post-doc and member of the research group. "But once you factor in outright lying, and add on the fact that everybody's counting the 50 little red bullets on their homepage as 50 hits or even as 50 visits, then you start to come up with numbers like maybe 80,000 actual people per day are "netsurfing" and, after webmasters, the next largest category of non-robot activity is probably people doing demos of the web on live TV shows."

Though the claims of the survey were quickly and violently refuted by Web and Internet Providers all across the country, as well as by publishers of "How-To" Internet books and by the producers of Internet-themed movies, TV shows, and CD-ROMs, none could point to specific flaws in its methodology.

One attempt came from Mitchell Forbin, director of OmniWWW, a website provider in Topeka, Kansas, who claimed that, "Given all the filth and porno that moves through the web in a day, if there's only 80,000 people consuming it, I think you'd be seeing their bodyparts strewn all over the countryside from extreme sexual over-saturation. Since you don't, there must be at least a million or more people soaking up all that lame net.porn, in order for this to not be happening in massive numbers every day."

Other results of the survey indicate that:

1. Most average users, after an initial rush of excitement, quickly tire of the web, and go back to using their accounts strictly for e-mail.

2. Of the many Gigabytes downloaded each day, 98-99.92% are never accessed or looked at again and simply sit and rot on a hard drive somewhere, until deleted.

3. The suicide rate for CEOs and boardmembers of large media companies with websites, should reach 97% by the end of 1996.

The survey, conducted between October and November, shortly after the Mike Rosoff Network came online, included 100,000 respondents, 20 percent of whom accessed the Web through tin can telephones on taut fishing line.

-- Tere Moto

(exclusive to the Mike Rosoff Network)