Xref: utzoo news.groups:12433 news.misc:3639
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc
Subject: Re: accuracy of arbitron "reader" data
Message-ID: <19376@looking.on.ca>
Date: 22 Sep 89 04:54:47 GMT
References: <18401@looking.on.ca> <790@uvaarpa.virginia.edu> <34921@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 33
Class: discussion

In article <34921@apple.Apple.COM> chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
>
>Agreed. Arbitron has generaly shown readership of rec.mag.otherrealms in the
>3500-5000 range. I've done independent surveys where, by checking the
>percentage of returns in an area with known levels of readership and
>extrapolating those out to the entire survey response, my readership is
>closer to 11,000 to 15,000. 

OtherRealms, as you know, is a very special case, because it is 12 articles
over 3 days once every N months.  Many sites are down to 1 week expire now.
(Hell, I used to run 1 day expire on most groups) and so it makes sense
that a once/month arbitron report would be off by a factor of 4.

In fact, didn't Chuq once deliberately arrange to expire R.M.O well beyond
the default time, in part to avoid having to deal with back-issue requests,
but also in part to make sure it showed up on the Arbitron surveys?

Actually, my personal opinion is that the survey results are too high,
by as much as a factor of 5 in some cases.  71,000 for rec.humor.funny?
Not a chance in the world.  But that's because we have no really strong
reliable way to find out what percentage of total netreaders the 719
arbitron sites represent.  Brian says 4.5% based on the fact that there are
15,000 machines in net maps.  A survey I did said that about 21% of all
USENET articles are posted by readers at arbitron sites.  The real answer
lies between.

But all this is not important in calculating readers per site, unless you
feel that the readers/site figure for arbitron sites is extremely
atypical.   NNTP doesn't affect this figure, other than to plump it up,
since adding reports for sites that read by NNTP would add thousands of
single-user sites that can't possibly increase the readers/site figure over 1.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473