By Doug Gross, CNN
May 31, 2011 12:24 p.m. EDT | Filed under: Web
One-fourth of U.S. adults have made Web calls on tools like Skype, Google Voice. Facebook is believed to be mulling voice chat.
(CNN) -- Online telephone calls have seen a big jump in popularity in the past couple of years, according to new survey numbers.
After years of modest use, nearly one-fourth of all American adults who use the Internet say they have made a Web-based phone call, according to the survey by the Pew Internet and Amercian Life Project.
The results come in the wake of the news earlier this month that computing giant Microsoft had bought popular Web chat tool Skype for a staggering $8.5 billion.
According to a Pew report, 24 percent of online U.S. adults have placed calls online. That's 19 percent of all adults in the country.
On any give day, 5 percent of the Web's users are making phone calls using services like Skype, Vonage and Google Voice, according to the results.
Both of those numbers are up sharply from the last time Pew, which explores the impact of the Internet on American life, asked a similar question.
In 2007, Pew reported that 8 percent of internet users had made a call online and 2 percent did so on any given day.
Earlier in the 2000s, several surveys suggested that no more than one-tenth of users made calls and that never more than 1 percent did so each day.
According to the recent survey's results, men and women are pretty much equally making the Web-based calls. The most frequent callers (27 percent) are in the 18-29 year-old age group and users 65 and older are least likely (18 percent).
Hispanic users had the highest percentage (27 percent) saying they make Web calls, with 21 percent of both black and white respondents saying they do so.
The poll, of 846 internet users, was completed last week. It has a margin of error of +/-3.7 percent.
Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)
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