Re: number of subscribers

[uli@zoodle.RoBIN.de (Ulrich Grepel)]

Bill reveals:
> At the moment there are 334 direct subscribers to the list.  Of course,
> many hundreds or thousands more read via the USENET newsgroup rec.music.gaffa;
> exact numbers for same are not available.

Not exact numbers, but estimated ones. These can be found in the monthly
usenet reports by Brian Reid (sp?) (newsgroup news.lists), the estimation is
done by checking on a sample of a few hundred hosts how many subscribers of
each newsgroup there are. 'Subscriber' does mean that the person in question
looked into that newsgroup at least once during the time the samples are collected.
Looking into the newsgroup is already done by just looking at some subjects
and not even reading a single article. Another factor of uncertainity is that
noone knows the real size of the net. Considering all this, we're estimated
with about 48000 readers right now. Pretty impressive, but remember that
of these maybe 480 are posting at least once a year.

I tried to do a small survey a while ago, posted it several times, and got <80
answers with answers from 'read once a month' to 'read dayly', and also 'post
never' to 'post daily'. I should try another run of that survey, it's still
there.

> I am reluctant to post a list of subscribers.

And with very good reason. Imagine you'd find out that there is a 'kate@kent.uk'
or so on there... and we are all speculating about bootlegs and so on ;-).
Nope. Some want to stay lurkers and that's ok.

Bye,

Uli


--
"Mann, was glaubst'n Du, was das fuer 'ne Rechenleistung is?" - "'n 66'er,
_mindestens_" (2*anon, CeBIT '94, SGI booth, Onyx/PowerChallenge presentation)