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From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc
Subject: Re: Report Card on the success of the group creation guidelines
Message-ID: <18401@looking.on.ca>
Date: 21 Sep 89 01:06:29 GMT
References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu> <45814@bbn.COM> <4402@ncar.ucar.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 30
Class: discussion

Greg has often written to me that he doesn't feel there is any significant
accuracy to the readers/machine figures that one can derive from Brian's
arbitron figures.   One thing is clear, the readers/machine figure is
exact for arbitron sites.  Does that relate to the whole net?

Greg thinks no, because at his site they have an NNTP server where nobody
reads news and lots of clients which are never counted in arbitron surveys.
Is this typical?  I also know sites which have a server where lots of people
read news on the server, and others read on the clients.  Which is more
common?

But I fail to see why this is a problem.  Are many arbitron reports sent in
for servers with no readers?  Why would anybody bother so send in such
a report?  Arbitron senders, let me know?

If anything, arbitron is highly biased to large sites, which would mean that
the figure of readers/machine on arbitron sites is higher than the figure for
the net.  For it to be lower, arbitron would have to be stronly biased towards
small sites and sites without a lot of newsreaders.  I have a hard time
understanding how this could be.

In fact, isn't the whole point of NNTP to allow newsreading on small machines?
So not having them included in the arbitron stats would only increase the
readers/machine figure.

The real figure we want is total readers per 'thing that costs money,'
namely long disk storage and long distance transmission.  But that's harder
to figure out.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473