[news.admin] More interesting net statistics

brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (02/03/88)

Looking at the latest round of readership stats, some more interesting
facts can be garnered.

By taking the dot product of readers and articles, we get the thought that
there were 491,000,000 articles read on the net last month by the various
people.

If each article took 3 seconds to scan or read, that's 1,473,000,000 seconds
or 409,166 man-hours.  At 7.5 MH per day, that's 54,555 man-days spent
reading news, and at 220 days/man-year, that's about 250 man-years spent
reading news in the month of January.

Extrapolate for the year to get 3,000 man years spent reading this stuff
in a year without growth from last month.

Of the 50,000 messages posted, if we assume 10 minutes per message,
that's only an extra 5 man years writing the messages per month, or 60 per
year.


All this, and we can never conjure up more than a man-year or two of
effort to write new software and fix problems!

By the way, based on B.R.'s statistics for the number of netreaders, those
491,000,000 reader-messages work out to about 75 messages per day per
active newsreader, and 17 messages/day per user-with-account.

Since the average newsgroup has 5.3 messages/day, the average reader
looks at 14 groups.  (Or just one big group)
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473

aburt@isis.UUCP (Andrew Burt) (02/09/88)

In article <1372@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
->If each article took 3 seconds to scan or read

->By the way, based on B.R.'s statistics for the number of netreaders, those
->491,000,000 reader-messages work out to about 75 messages per day per
->active newsreader, and 17 messages/day per user-with-account.

You failed to mention: 75 msg/day * 3 sec/msg = 225 sec/day or 4 min/day
the avg. reader spends reading news.  Seems low...
-- 

Andrew Burt 				   			isis!aburt

              Fight Denver's pollution:  Don't Breathe and Drive.