Institutional markets for online services: analysis of supply‐side competition in the UK

Published statistics about the size of the market for online services are rarely presented with any provenance and are frequently full of errors. The statistics used in preparing this paper present a partial view, that of online supply services to the United Kingdom. From July 1987 to December 1988 the authors monitored the expenditure on online services of representative panels of users in universities, polytechnics and public libraries, chosen because it was felt that public‐funded bodies would be more amenable to supplying usage data than private sector organisations in industry and commerce. The authors intend, in future investigations, to include this larger, more high‐spending sector.