From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) Subject: Readership report.. Date: 2 Oct 1992 10:34:35 GMT
In case somebody doesn't follow news.lists, here are selected parts of
the september-92 readership reports. In case you want the full report,
it's available in news.list along with some other general news-related
reports.
Interestingly, comp.os.linux propagation has gone up from just 56% to
71% within the last month. At the same time, the estimated total number
of readers figures have become smaller by a noticeable amount - but not
just for linux. There have probably been some changes to the way the
readership is counted.
For those that think linux is an active group: you are right. We aren't
far behind alt.sex (THE newsgroup when it comes to popularity - although
some other groups do have a bigger audience) in number of articles, and
linux has been in the top 40 in both traffic volume and cost-per-reader
for the last few months.
As to actual popularity: propagation is still pretty low (80% is normal
for a comp group it seems), but being the 335th most popular group isn't
bad for this kind of specialized group.
Linus
--- edited list follows ---
This is the full set of data from the USENET readership report for Sep 92.
Explanations of the figures are in a companion posting.
+-- 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 160000 5317 83% 980 1933.6 22% 0.02 11.5% misc.jobs.offered
2 160000 5142 82% 1568 1909.7 40% 0.02 11.1% misc.forsale
3 150000 4788 89% 10 157.9 100% 0.00 10.3% news.announce.newusers
4 120000 3910 68% 2556 6290.4 45% 0.07 8.4% alt.sex
...
20 68000 2241 86% 1120 2335.9 15% 0.06 4.8% comp.lang.c
...
69 44000 1448 85% 945 1622.4 15% 0.06 3.1% comp.unix.sysv386
...
119 36000 1186 76% 1381 3445.7 2% 0.14 2.6% comp.unix.bsd
...
128 35000 1140 85% 534 902.9 11% 0.04 2.5% comp.unix.ultrix
...
262 25000 830 81% 10 11.1 10% 0.00 1.8% comp.os.misc
...
335 22000 733 71% 2392 4082.2 2% 0.26 1.6% comp.os.linux
...
365 21000 705 83% 139 327.0 5% 0.03 1.5% comp.os.minix
...
606 15000 498 76% 688 988.4 0% 0.10 1.1% comp.os.coherent
...
892 10000 345 79% 4 5.5 25% 0.00 0.7% comp.unix.sysv286
..
1577 1500 48 9% 24 31.7 0% 0.00 0.1% houston.eats