On 06/04/2013 12:10, Owain wrote:
On Apr 5, 2:55 pm, John Rumm wrote:
It's not so much the steady decline in volumes, although if continued, Usenet
will be gone by 2016(*), but the 'number of posters' figures. There are 40
million people on the internet in the UK and only 1500 of them post to
Usenet? (Actually fewer than that, given that a some of them will be sock
puppets).
Traffic on uk.d-i-y is still holding strong though... 7.5k posts / month
for the last 12 months. in fact a rise from 2007, but not quite up to
the peak of 10k at the end of 2004.

If not using the new google groups, this may still work:

http://groups.google.com/group/uk.d-i-y/about

Totalling the figures up for each year and comparing with the total
for the previous year gives

1997 14541 131.3%
1998 24379 167.7%
1999 33168 136.1%
2000 34894 105.2%
2001 46839 134.2%
2002 60738 129.7%
2003 89165 146.8%
2004 111777 125.4%
2005 116103 103.9%
2006 119900 103.3%
2007 86737 72.3%
2008 87441 100.8%
2009 76629 87.6%
2010 76066 99.3%
2011 77281 101.6%
2012 95225 123.2%

so UK DIY has been increasing every year apart from 2007, 08 and
(just) 2010.

I can't think how many email addresses or usernames I've had on
Usenet, I used to change them frequently to prevent spam before decent
spam filtering came in, so that will skew my posting stats (and
probably most others).

Comparative stats for uk.railway:

2000 84744 100.3%
2001 83938 99.0%
2002 78714 93.8%
2003 90027 114.4%
2004 99529 110.6%
2005 81231 81.6%
2006 80928 99.6%
2007 94280 116.5%
2008 81578 86.5%
2009 79299 97.2%
2010 72436 91.3%
2011 66383 91.6%
2012 56653 85.3%

And for uk.telecom:

1997 36887 114.3%
1998 53241 144.3%
1999 64073 120.3%
2000 41765 65.2%
2001 26685 63.9%
2002 21778 81.6%
2003 17564 80.7%
2004 20740 118.1%
2005 19888 95.9%
2006 13485 67.8%
2007 9780 72.5%
2008 6500 66.5%
2009 5035 77.5%
2010 4207 83.6%
2011 3112 74.0%
2012 2438 78.3%

which has been getting less popular every year since 2004 :-( Although
I suppose one should bring in the uk.telecom.* posts as well

I wonder what caused the peak on all the groups in 2004? I know it
wasn't me, I was out of the country a lot of the time.


--
Tciao for Now!

John.