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From: randall@uvaarpa.virginia.edu (Randall Atkinson)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc
Subject: RE: accuracy of arbitron "reader" data
Message-ID: <790@uvaarpa.virginia.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 89 12:03:02 GMT
References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu> <45814@bbn.COM> <4402@ncar.ucar.edu> <18401@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: randall@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Randall Atkinson)
Organization: Common Architecture Project, GE-Fanuc
Lines: 26

In article <18401@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>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.  

Until last month beginning who knows when, edison.cho.ge.com was reporting
wildly inaccurrate counts of people reading newsgroups.  The reason was
that the expire we used didn't have the options that arbitron expected
us to use, so our active file misled arbitron about which articles were
recent.  This has been fixed somewhat, but now arbitron reports the
correct number of newsreaders but 0 users on the system.  The arbitron
data is not exact for arbitron sites. QED

Nevertheless, I think that the arbitron and inpaths data are useful
benchmarks as long as we recognise upfront that they are not accurate.
I do trust them for broad trends and for propogation and flow information.

The point about large sites running rrn and sending in misleading
"who reads what" statistics is very true.  This university (UVa)
primarily uses rrn to a single machine and so any reports which might
be sent from here are going to be much lower than reality with
respect to the "reader" data.

DISCLAIMER:  I don't speak for the corporation which is the University
	of Virginia; these are my own views.