Xref: utzoo news.admin:14681 trial.newgroups:23 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!rivm!rivm39!a3 From: a3@rivm39.rivm.nl (Adri Verhoef) Newsgroups: news.admin,trial.newgroups Subject: Re: Arbitron Message-ID: <1991May27.161549.2567@rivm.nl> Date: 27 May 91 16:15:49 GMT References: <1991May17.170212.5145@looking.on.ca> Sender: news@rivm.nl Organization: RIVM, Bilthoven, Netherlands Lines: 29 >| b) Arbitron stats are becoming less reliable. [...] >Perhaps it's time to admit that arbitron is now a poor indicator of >readership entirely? Many sites, and especially large, new sites have >gone to using NNTP feed machines and newsreaders on a variety of other >machines, both Unix and non_unix, to serve their populations. This >lets them add news without heavily affecting the user distribution and >forcing everyone to have an account on a single Unix box where news >would be read/stored. The old model of "everybody reads on a >(connected) Unix system" is quickly falling by the wayside, but >arbitron hasn't changed; even a group of Unix boxes connected via NFS >is difficult to grab arbitron figures for. The problem of supplying >arbitron information when you don't even have access to, much less >administrative control over, systems that can read news via NNTP is a >real problem. Until the protocol for NNTP offers some arbitron >features, don't expect an increase in the reporting percentages. I was aware of this. That's why I tried to convince other boxes' administrators to gather statistics for their box and have it sent to a central account: All systems that read news inside my domain should produce arbitron statistics and forward the results to the central account, once per month. After a five day waiting period, the results from the central account are gathered together and the final computing step results in a Netreaders count per newsgroup, which is identical to the arbitron input format. So my domain hides several hosts, of which you'll see only one arbitron report. I know that not every host reports, but you'll get the idea.