🚀 go-pugleaf

Readership information is posted monthly by the Network Measure Project at
Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Labs. I include parts of the
most recent report below. I have also included the estimated readership info for
the month of Aug. 92 (last time I looked previously), since that was higher.
This is very unusual, since network volume and almost all other usage parameters
are more than doubling each year.

I checked with Brian Reid and he said this change is due to the new way he is
estimating parameters. So, the best guess about number of readers is now about
28,000. (There is a bimonthly increase of about 3%.) I don't think the figures
he gives takes into account non-Netnews readers. We know from previous
discussions both in this group and in news.admin that some large commercial
services download Usenet groups. Sometimes these readers cannot post to the
group. Also, there are many people who access news via WAIS and other archive
oriented software. So the cumulative readership over time will be much higher
then the estimates below. 

Once something is archived on the net, readership seems to increase
indefinitely. I am now in contact with someone at IBM who read an article I
posted to VIRUS-L two years after it was archived. I doubt this contact would
have occurred if the article had been published on paper. The full text
searchability of Netnews articles makes finding relevant material much easier
and more reliable.

I will add the source for readership info to the Introduction. I am sure this
will cause flames in the future about the length of that post :-)

========================================================



From: reid@decwrl.DEC.COM (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: news.lists
Subject: USENET Readership report for Nov 92
Date: 4 Dec 1992 17:14:51 GMT
Organization: DEC Network Systems Laboratory
Lines: 1683
Approved: reid@decwrl.dec.com
Message-ID: <1fo3mbINN7um@usenet.pa.dec.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: torrey.pa.dec.com
Summary: data for all groups
Keywords: arbitron, statistics, full
Originator: reid@torrey.pa.dec.com

This is the full set of data from the USENET readership report for Nov 92.
Explanations of the figures are in a companion posting.

        +-- Estimated total number of people who read the group, worldwide.
        |     +-- Actual number of readers in sampled population
        |     |     +-- Propagation: how many sites receive this group at all
        |     |     |      +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
        |     |     |      |      +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
        |     |     |      |      |      +-- Crossposting percentage
        |     |     |      |      |      |    +-- Cost ratio: $US/month/rdr
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      +-- Share: % of newsrders
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      |   who read this group.
        V     V     V      V      V      V    V      V
   1 180000  5379   90%     1    12.1   100%  0.00  10.9%
news.announce.newusers 
   2 170000  4910   83%  1226  1401.3    28%  0.01  10.0%  misc.forsale 
   3 170000  4862   84%   871  1762.7    20%  0.02   9.9%  misc.jobs.offered 
   4 140000  4235   67%  2014  4176.9    51%  0.04   8.6%  alt.sex 
.
.
.

 337  26000   748   66%   110   168.4    22%  0.01   1.5%  comp.bbs.misc 
 338  26000   747   81%    45   161.5    10%  0.01   1.5%  comp.groupware 
 339  25000   744   78%    34    68.1     6%  0.00   1.5%  comp.org.acm 
.
.
.
1668   1700    50   12%    26    44.0    52%  0.01   0.1%  ne.motss 
1669   1700    50   11%    55    69.9     2%  0.01   0.1%  de.talk.jokes.d 
1670   1700    50   10%    43    73.6     2%  0.01   0.1%  de.soc.studium 



-------------
USENET Readership report for Aug 92

 297  47000  1027   80%    48   128.9    20%  0.01   1.9%  comp.groupware

-- 
David S. Stodolsky                            Tel: + 45 31 95 92 82
Department of Computer Science                Fax: + 45 46 75 42 01
Bldg. 20.1, Roskilde University              Internet: david@ruc.dk
Post Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark      or: david@mcsun.EU.net