Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Cost of posting to the net
Message-ID: <1006@looking.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 15:00:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: looking.1006
Posted: Sun Oct  4 15:00:17 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Oct-87 07:07:58 EDT
References: <8200@felix.UUCP> <29937@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 44

In article <29937@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
(deleting the "writes" line for the person he's quoting)
>>I recently sat down and computed the cost of posting one byte to the net,
>>based on the figures in Rick's and Brian's articles in news.lists.
>
>>	1 byte * .15/minute @800 baud * 7700 sites = .24
>
>>I found this pretty amazing, especially considering the number of people who
>>are intent on ignoring the 4-line signature limit and reposting entire
>>articles.

Fortunately, you're way off here.  There are by no means 7700 long distance
links on the net.  There are more like a few hundred.  Most of the links
are local calls, lans, existing hard links, internal AT&T phone system etc.
(Yes I know funny money is billed for internal AT&T calls)

So it's more like 1 cent per byte.  At the current net volue of 2 megs/day,
that's still $20,000 per day or approximately 7 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR,
most of it spent on crap.

>Look at it in context. OtherRealms had ~200K in the last issue. At $.24 per
>byte, the total cost to deliver OtherRealms was about $48,000. That seems
>like a LOT of money. If you look at it as a cost per reader, though,
>OtherRealms cost $0.23. Not per byte, but per reader. This means that my
>entire magazine cost each reader less than your byte cost the entire net.
>And it's an amazing bargain when you consider that the street price of
>OtherRealms is $2.50, or an order of magnitude higher.
>
I don't know where you get a figure of ~200,000 readers for you group, Chuq.
The last net survey (hitting 7% of usenet) showed 528 readers for your group.
This survey hits mostly larger sites, and I figure this means about 4,000
readers on usenet.  Are the other 196,000 on connected nets?  It doesn't
matter, because we're talking about the usenet cost, anyway.

This survey was taken after you put long expiry dates on the articles to make
them show up in the survey.   Thus, at 1 cent/byte, OtherRealms costs
$2,000 to post, which among 4,000 readers shows up at 50 cents/reader, which
is quite close to your previous estimate.  This would be an admirable cost
if it were being paid by those readers, but it isn't.
>Numbers are great, but lets keep them in perspective. 

Indeed!
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473