More numbers with caveats

You can consider today the day of skeptical statistics. Ran into this, "eMarketer predicts a 14% increase in mothers online for the period from 2005 to 2010."

It's a very short blurb so I'll just paste the rest of it so you don't have to do the jump:

"eMarketer estimates that there were 32 million mothers online in the U.S. in 2005, equivalent to 18.4 percent of the total internet population. The number of mothers online will reach 36.6 million in 2010, an increase of 14 percent from 2005."

Makes me wonder though: Is this because more current moms are going online or is it because more women of child-bearing age, who are already online, will become mothers during this time?

If it's the latter, then this is hardly newsworthy. Just a normal progression of the population from the older non-wired generation to our generation.

If the former, then that's kinda interesting. Will the content and value of the Internet increase in the next few years to provide moms with something they're not getting online now? I can't imagine a significant enough shift in content for this to happen but maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough.

via iMedia Connection.