- Jul 10, 2010
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Fairly early in this thread http://forum.cyclingnews.com/showthread.php?t=17361 JV made a comment about the small size of our subculture here in The Clinic. I defended him, but just estimated some numbers of our numbers as a group.
Since then, I have found out that the forums have some pretty slick tools to tell us exactly how many posters have posted, who they are, and how many each has posted. This tells me a lot, I think about us as a population. Both in the CN Forums, and especially in The Clinic.
For instance, the original USADA-Armstrong thread was mentioned as an example of how BIG we were as an influence. That thread closed with 1.3M views. It is one of the biggest threads on these forums. From those views, only 557 viewers posted in that thread. That is 10,844 posts, made by 557 people. Of those, only 340 thought about the thread enough to actually take part in the conversation, with 3 posts or more. 6 posts or more? 243 people.
557 posters. Out of 1.3M plus views. We are not a big community. Given that 2 people posted more than 500 times each in that thread, we can't say that 1.3M views represents anywhere near that number of people.
But how many people viewed the thread? In the customer support industry, I think it is a rule-of-thumb to use 10 dissatisfied customers for every one complaint you get. Ok, let's borrow that rule-of-thumb: 10 times 557 equals 5600 people. If only 5600 people read that thread, that would be 230 or so views per person. Hmmm - too many.
Start from the number of posts - round it to 11K. Ok, we have 120 views per post. If you accept that it might be a reasonable estimate to say that, for each post, the poster got 10 views, then we can say that our posters viewed the thread 110,000 times. Which - still leaves the number of views extremely high at over 1M. I know I have read that click-thru's and viewed stats generate extremely high numbers compared to the actual number of people who truly read or are interested, or for that matter, really exist - but do we have anybody in the IT field who can put some body in that? Some kind of rule-of-thumb numbers? I find it hard to believe that 1M people actually might have read some portion of that thread.
On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that a few hundred actually read the forum and are interested enough to post. I could even believe that we might number in the thousands, but I wouldn't bet on anything more than 5K.
Maybe the mods can find out how many members have signed up for the forums.
Btw, if you want to examine the stats for a thread, like I did above, you click on the "posts" number to the right of the thread, when viewing the thread list in the forum. That pops up a window with a list of who has posted, and how many times each has posted. If you click the poster name, you go to their profile. If you click on the number of posts they did, you get a search screen listing their posts in that thread. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work at the Forum or Subforum level, but this is still pretty slick.
Since then, I have found out that the forums have some pretty slick tools to tell us exactly how many posters have posted, who they are, and how many each has posted. This tells me a lot, I think about us as a population. Both in the CN Forums, and especially in The Clinic.
For instance, the original USADA-Armstrong thread was mentioned as an example of how BIG we were as an influence. That thread closed with 1.3M views. It is one of the biggest threads on these forums. From those views, only 557 viewers posted in that thread. That is 10,844 posts, made by 557 people. Of those, only 340 thought about the thread enough to actually take part in the conversation, with 3 posts or more. 6 posts or more? 243 people.
557 posters. Out of 1.3M plus views. We are not a big community. Given that 2 people posted more than 500 times each in that thread, we can't say that 1.3M views represents anywhere near that number of people.
But how many people viewed the thread? In the customer support industry, I think it is a rule-of-thumb to use 10 dissatisfied customers for every one complaint you get. Ok, let's borrow that rule-of-thumb: 10 times 557 equals 5600 people. If only 5600 people read that thread, that would be 230 or so views per person. Hmmm - too many.
Start from the number of posts - round it to 11K. Ok, we have 120 views per post. If you accept that it might be a reasonable estimate to say that, for each post, the poster got 10 views, then we can say that our posters viewed the thread 110,000 times. Which - still leaves the number of views extremely high at over 1M. I know I have read that click-thru's and viewed stats generate extremely high numbers compared to the actual number of people who truly read or are interested, or for that matter, really exist - but do we have anybody in the IT field who can put some body in that? Some kind of rule-of-thumb numbers? I find it hard to believe that 1M people actually might have read some portion of that thread.
On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that a few hundred actually read the forum and are interested enough to post. I could even believe that we might number in the thousands, but I wouldn't bet on anything more than 5K.
Maybe the mods can find out how many members have signed up for the forums.
Btw, if you want to examine the stats for a thread, like I did above, you click on the "posts" number to the right of the thread, when viewing the thread list in the forum. That pops up a window with a list of who has posted, and how many times each has posted. If you click the poster name, you go to their profile. If you click on the number of posts they did, you get a search screen listing their posts in that thread. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work at the Forum or Subforum level, but this is still pretty slick.
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