Xref: utzoo news.groups:12383 news.misc:3622
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From: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc
Subject: Re: Report Card on the success of the group creation guidelines
Message-ID: <9646@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 20 Sep 89 15:03:59 GMT
References: <17735@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker,00440,cb,1D211,6148604019)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 58

In article <17735@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>In order to find out just how successful groups created under the guidelines
>have been, I decided to look up the readership stats for all groups that
>were not on Brian's readership guidelines near the end of 1987.
>
>The results follow.   Almost one group has been created per week.  Yet
>only 8 groups created in the 'official' way have managed to get at least one
>reader per machine they propagate to!  Only 2 (plus comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d,
>which I am unsure of) made the top 50.  The vast majority are going to large
>numbers of machines where nobody reads them at all. 

While this at one point appears a reasonable measurement, I find it 
quite unreasonable.  It seems somehow odd to discount a newsgroup of
15,000 readers (400-500 bonafide) with the wave of a hand because
"that's less than one reader per machine".  

From the immediate, self-centered viewpoint, it does make sense to do so
(*not* intending to flame here; couldn't think of a more polite way
to word it).  After all, as administrator on Site X, "why carry 
comp.fubar if none of my readers read it ?  On the other hand, I
*do* want to carry comp.snafu, as I read that myself."

But what needs be considered, I feel, is that at the next site downstream,
the adminstration is wondering, "Why carry comp.snafu? Nobody here
reads it.  I'm only interested in comp.fubar."

It seems to me that this is all part of the cost of being in a net;
you carry other peoples' groups, for the sake of their connectivity,
and they carry yours.

Even the most popular groups have only 3-4 readers per site, if
my memory serves (naturally, the monthly arbitron posting has expired
here...).  I seem to recall 60,000 for r.h.f.

Clearly, by any standards, some groups will be held more popular than 
others.  Rec.humor.funny is a clear example; always near the top of the
readership list, low in volume, virtually zero cost per reader.  On the
other hand, it serves only for entertainment, so I suppose some would claim
it's not a "good" newsgroup, either.   But to hold all newsgroups against
that sort of standard is, IMHO, ridiculous.   The most effective standard
by which I would summarily judge a group is the traffic per reader figure;
and I hesitate even to apply that.

Quite simply, if every group had a readership in excess of 30,000 (two per
machine), I contend that the volume in those groups would become so
unmanageable that public referendum (survey, if you insist) would soon
split them into smaller groups, with less than 15,000 readers each.  We
see this happening even now; witness the creation of talk.politics.guns
from the overcrowded talk.politics.misc.

Anyway, Brad, my curiousity is piqued.  Having implied the majority of
the newsgroups created in the past two years are failures, what criteria
would you suggest as adequate demonstration of a group's worth ?

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Bill Thacker						wbt@cbnews.att.com
	I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it
	  as Presidential eligibility.  -  Paula Poundstone, NNTN