The Internet has certainly given the power to the people. Unlike television, where you may gain viewers purely for the reason that there is nothing better on the other channels, you can't make the same assumptions about your web site.

The choice for television viewers is very small, when compared to the Internet. In some countries, people only have the state run TV channel to watch. Many countries with free to air TV may offer a handful of stations. Depending upon where you live, if you opt for cable TV you may have between 50 - 200 channels available.

Although it is virtually impossible to provide accurate statistics about how big the Internet actually is, even the lowest of the best guess estimates, make the TV figures pale in comparison.

According to figures from the Internet Software Consortium in 1999, there were 56 million web hosts (i.e. Servers providing access to web pages)

Estimates of the number of documents on the Internet range from 1 or 2 billion (indexed by the search engines and directories) to over 550 billion documents.

BrightPlanet (a South Dakota based start-up) says that the lower estimates are inadequate, since they refer only to the number of 'surface' web pages. They do not delve into the deep Web, which includes the increasing amount of information stored in "giant evolving databases set up by government agencies, universities and corporations".

BrightPlanet says there are actually over 550 billion documents on the Internet. Five hundred and fifty billion: that's about 90 documents online for every man, woman and child on the planet.

So even with the lowest estimate your web page has to compete with 1 billion others