Xref: utzoo unix-pc.general:3286 comp.sys.att:6960
Path: utzoo!censor!becker!bdb
From: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: Too much cross-posting?
Message-ID: <638@becker.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jul 89 14:25:42 GMT
References: <674@whizz.uucp> <171@zebra.UUCP> <157@zorch.UU.NET> <688@whizz.uucp> <159@zorch.UU.NET>
Reply-To: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 43

In article <159@zorch.UU.NET> scott@zorch.UU.NET (Scott Hazen Mueller) writes:
|[...]
|Okay, some hard facts:
|
|       +-- 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/reader
|       |     |     |      |     |      |    |       +-- Share: % of newsreaders
|       |     |     |      |     |      |    |       |   who read this group.
|       V     V     V      V     V      V    V       V
|112 14000   670   95%   132  243.9    39%  0.03    2.7%  comp.sys.att
|423   590    29    3%   202  321.0    59%  0.03    0.1%  unix-pc.general
|427   480    24    2%    16  240.7    67%  0.03    0.1%  unix-pc.sources
|
|As a reasonable estimate, unix-pc.* might well go to 18000 (estimated)
|readers if a straight-line extrapolation makes sense.  I'm not at all
|confident, though, that the "small-town" atmosphere that makes unix-pc work
|as well as it has would survive the mainstream Usenet.

	One of the reasons that the "unix-pc" numbers are so
	small is that there is a long-standing bug in "arbitron",
	the program which gathers and sends out these statistics
	each month from reporting sites.

	The bug is that newsgroups with other than "^[a-z]*\."
	in their names are not selected for the report. Since
	the string "unix-pc." has '-' in it, it is not selected.

	The fix is to change to "egrep '^[a-z][-0-9_a-z]*\.' $ACTIVE"
	in the appropriate places in the "arbitron" script.
	I've posted this (& some other fixes) to the appropriate
	newsgroups recently, so there might be some change
	in the future...

-- 
   __	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ont.
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_<  >_	 "A vole in time saves nine" - Ramanujan