Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

5.8. How much stuff passes through the Usenet?

A lot! In the two-week period before I wrote these words, Usenet traffic approached 90 megabytes per day. You can find out how busy the Usenet is by reading the messages Total traffic through uunet for the last 2 weeks, which are posted periodically to the newsgroup news.lists. These messages detail the number and size of all the messages that pass through UUNET Communications, a major Internet hub and service provider. They also show what newsgroup hierarchies see the most use. Here's an example: 
news.lists (moderated) #1013 (7 more)
From: newsstats@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Total traffic through uunet for the last 2 weeks
Date: Mon Jan 24 09:08:44 PST 1994
Organization: UUNET Communications
673328 articles, totaling 1251.764104 Mbytes (1607.763435 
including headers), were submitted from 43439 different 
Usenet sites by 141421 different users to 8910 different newsgroups
for an average of 89.411722 Mbytes (114.840245 including headers)
per day.

Only categories receiving an average of 1 or more article per day
are listed.
                                  Article                 Total
        Category        Count     Mbytes        Percent   Mbytes
        alt              173977 558.572659      44.6%   655.361424
        rec              138678 210.941356      16.9%   282.061621
        comp             116142 181.985099      14.5%   243.368251
        soc               52397 110.112458       8.8%   140.527408
        misc              26957  39.500316       3.2%    53.869506
        talk              18405  39.457156       3.2%    51.367199
        de                10700  37.951659       3.0%    44.142952
        sci               19820  34.986043       2.8%    45.692273
        bit               22798  33.823799       2.7%    50.226438
        news               4450  28.623819       2.3%    31.309438
        relcom            34356  28.225976       2.3%    51.535220
        zer               18443  26.276050       2.1%    39.191961
        clari             34149  25.542684       2.0%    44.816616
        fj                10013  19.357237       1.5%    25.526185
        cbd                7119   9.626486       0.8%    12.965948
        americast          2857   8.750183       0.7%     9.900073
        maus              12481   7.078011       0.6%    14.258556
        ba                 5214   6.660749       0.5%     9.211163
        ncar               4229   5.991553       0.5%     7.817455
        sfnet              4466   5.332375       0.4%     7.700691
        gnu                2119   4.938273       0.4%     6.053602
        ca                 1607   4.605775       0.4%     5.455496

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