rec.music.gaffa popularity

[Alex Gibbs <arg@kilimanjaro.opt-sci.Arizona.EDU>]

nessus@twitch.mit.edu (Douglas Alan) writes:
> In article <9312211523.AA14251@kilimanjaro.opt-sci.Arizona.EDU> arg@kilimanjaro.opt-sci.Arizona.EDU (Alex Gibbs) writes:
> 
> >   I'm curious where that estimate comes from.  Obvisouly the number
> >   of people on the mailing list could be found out.  Was the number
> >   of rec.music.gaffa usenet news readers an estimate from somewhere?
> 
> Yes, the newsgroup "news.lists" (or something like that) has estimates
> of the number of readers of each group based on extrapolations
> of data acquired from a large number of sites (but a small fraction
> of all the sites).  The definition of a "reader" is rather loosely
> defined as someone who has read at least one message in the group
> during the polling period.  The polls are done every few weeks.

Yeah, that's where I saw it long ago.  Not there now though.  However
I did ftp the last list from ftp.uu.net:
/usenet/news.lists/USENET_Readership_report_for_Nov_93.Z

As shown below, we have an estimated 35,000 newsgroup readers (not
mailling list).  We are #1047 out of the top 2547 groups when ranked
by number of readers from the sample.  I found that we are #378 when I
sorted the list by number of posts per month though.  The list comes
out VERY different then (for example the #1 read group only had two
posts last month.)  From the mentioned file, showing us and #1:

        +-- Estimated total number of people who read the group, worldwide.
        |     +-- Actual number of readers in sampled population
        |     |     +-- Propagation: how many sites receive this group at all
        |     |     |      +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
        |     |     |      |      +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
        |     |     |      |      |      +-- Crossposting percentage
        |     |     |      |      |      |    +-- Cost ratio: $US/month/rdr
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      +-- Share: % of newsrders
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      |   who read this group.
        V     V     V      V      V      V    V      V
   1 450000  6139   90%    2   24.1   100%  0.00 11.9%  news.announce.newusers 
1047  35000   479   74%  679 1306.4     0%  0.04  0.9%  rec.music.gaffa 

Basically |>oug's summary was good: they sampled about .53% of news
sites, but what constitutes a reader is even looser, as quoted from
USENET_READERSHIP_SUMMARY_REPORT_FOR_NOV_93.Z:

  Assuming that "reading a group" is roughly the same as "thumbing
  through a magazine", in that you don't necessarily have to read
  anything, but you have to browse through it and see what is there...

It is more technical than that and there is a lot of error in the
estimate but see the files if interested.

To find out how many people we actually have posting we'd basically have
to do our own data analysis.  As curious as I am I don't think I'm that
crazy, but I'm not sure...
---
AlexGibbs arg@kilimanjaro.opt-sci.arizona.edu |\| | (~, |-| ~|~ |-| /-\ \/\/ |<
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