Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu
From: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Just how big are some of these sites?
Message-ID: <13674@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 8 May 89 20:52:41 GMT
References: <3209@looking.UUCP>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 36
In-reply-to: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)

In article <3209@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking (Brad Templeton) writes:
|With talk about the relative size of USENET, I took a look at the new
|number Brian has added to his arbitron reports, namely the number of
|newsreaders at the reporting sites.  Here are the biggest ones:

[deleted]
|	bonnie.ics.uci.edu		944
[deleted]

|Now I, for one, find some of these numbers amazing.  While I realize
|that sometimes these are actually combined reports for a network of
|machines, I find it hard to believe that there are over 10,000 net
|readers (not users, net readers) on 2 sites in Pittsburgh.

|Where are these numbers coming from?  Are they wrong?  Or are they counting
|huge numbers of people who use netnews for local conferencing but don't
|read groups from the outside world?   Some places, like the Well, which
|sells timesharing and Usenet access, I can understand.  And big companies
|like Apple and Sequent belong up there.

You're interpreting the numbers incorrectly.  Those numbers are the
result of the arbitron programs "Number of Users" result, not the
"Number of Netreaders" result.  I'm sure that number is smaller at the
other sites.  I run the news for bonnie and can safely say that while
we may have 944 passwd entries, we have only 185 users reading news:

Host            bonnie.ics.uci.edu
Users           944
NetReaders      185
ReportDate      Apr1989
SystemType      news-arbitron-2.4

Mark Nagel @ UC Irvine, Department of Information and Computer Science
                            +----------------------------------------+
ARPA: nagel@ics.uci.edu     | Six plus six equals fourteen for large |
UUCP: ucbvax!ucivax!nagel   | values of six -- Dave Ackerman         |