Some aspects of Internet metrics: case of Croatia

Rapid advances in Internet technologies and the subsequent proliferation of economic activity on the Internet have given rise to the Internet economy. To address the Internet economy, certain Web characterisation should be applied, describing the structure, size, usage and content of the Web. The complex elements of such metrics include number of domains, users, hosts and number of WWW pages within the particular top-level domain. Long-term systematic measurements of such data enable us to estimate "time lag" in Internet usage and Internet growth between respective countries, i.e. time needed for particular country to reach the number of hosts and WWW pages in other countries. Also, a correlation was found between country´s GDP and number of hosts and WWW pages. This implies that Internet usage in a particular country is a reasonable proxy for factors that promote (or inhibit) the adoption of new technologies, which result in higher rates of economic output growth. Using data on hosts and WWW pages under top-level domain hr, in Internet usage in January 2003, Croatia was about 1 year behind CEFTA average and 2 to 4 years behind EU average.