kaul@ee.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rich Kaul) (05/18/91)
In article <1991May17.170212.5145@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: | b) Arbitron stats are becoming less reliable. [...] | USENET has increased an order of magnitude while the number of arbitron sites | stayed constant, or even dropped. Not good. Perhaps it's time to admit that arbitron is now a poor indicator of readership entirely? Many sites, and especially large, new sites have gone to using NNTP feed machines and newsreaders on a variety of other machines, both Unix and non_unix, to serve their populations. This lets them add news without heavily affecting the user distribution and forcing everyone to have an account on a single Unix box where news would be read/stored. The old model of "everybody reads on a (connected) Unix system" is quickly falling by the wayside, but arbitron hasn't changed; even a group of Unix boxes connected via NFS is difficult to grab arbitron figures for. The problem of supplying arbitron information when you don't even have access to, much less administrative control over, systems that can read news via NNTP is a real problem. Until the protocol for NNTP offers some arbitron features, don't expect an increase in the reporting percentages. (n.b. NNTP has it's own statistics gathering programs, but they really don't show the number of users, just the number of connections, which groups were read, how often, how many articles, etc. In some ways it's a more accurate gauge of demand than is arbitron.)
a3@rivm39.rivm.nl (Adri Verhoef) (05/27/91)
>| b) Arbitron stats are becoming less reliable. [...] >Perhaps it's time to admit that arbitron is now a poor indicator of >readership entirely? Many sites, and especially large, new sites have >gone to using NNTP feed machines and newsreaders on a variety of other >machines, both Unix and non_unix, to serve their populations. This >lets them add news without heavily affecting the user distribution and >forcing everyone to have an account on a single Unix box where news >would be read/stored. The old model of "everybody reads on a >(connected) Unix system" is quickly falling by the wayside, but >arbitron hasn't changed; even a group of Unix boxes connected via NFS >is difficult to grab arbitron figures for. The problem of supplying >arbitron information when you don't even have access to, much less >administrative control over, systems that can read news via NNTP is a >real problem. Until the protocol for NNTP offers some arbitron >features, don't expect an increase in the reporting percentages. I was aware of this. That's why I tried to convince other boxes' administrators to gather statistics for their box and have it sent to a central account: All systems that read news inside my domain should produce arbitron statistics and forward the results to the central account, once per month. After a five day waiting period, the results from the central account are gathered together and the final computing step results in a Netreaders count per newsgroup, which is identical to the arbitron input format. So my domain hides several hosts, of which you'll see only one arbitron report. I know that not every host reports, but you'll get the idea.