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From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: Re: more interim results from worldwide net readership poll
Message-ID: <5784@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 27-Mar-86 22:32:43 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.5784
Posted: Thu Mar 27 22:32:43 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Mar-86 04:46:21 EST
References: <5192@glacier.ARPA> <1994@hao.UUCP> <5249@glacier.ARPA>
Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 30
Xref: watmath net.news:4709 net.news.group:5304

In article <1425@garfield.columbia.edu> (David Eppstein) writes:
>This brings up a problem with this survey that I have been wondering
>about for a week or so.  Some groups have very low volume, such that
>it is possible for no articles to be current in the group when the
>survey is run.  If that were the case, the survey would show no
>readers when in fact many people may read the group.

The first version of arbitron that I posted took care of this. That is why,
for example, mod.movies shows up as being so popular. It counts news readers
for groups in which there is no recent traffic.

I thought this was OK, but a problem arose. Some sites do not get all
groups, and they incorrectly have the unsubscribed groups still present in
their active files. While technically this is an installation error for
netnews (you shouldn't have a group in your active file unless you actually
exchange that group with your news partner), we all know how fruitless it is
to get people to fix bugs in their news installations. If some site does not
get net.abortion, and never did, then it will look as though everybody reads
it.

It is in the area of low-readership, low-volume groups that the measurement
is least accurate. Although a few people have flamed me for the measurement
not being as accurate as they would like, nobody has come up with a better
technique, so I propose to keep on doing this until we figure out better
things to measure.


-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA