From:         Gene Spafford <spaf@CS.PURDUE.EDU>

Last stats I saw on news propagation indicated that major sites with
TCP/IP connections to the Internet (e.g., uunet, purdue, etc) get 90%
of all posted articles within 24-36 hours.  Many Usenet sites get
their news over slow, periodic dial-up links, and thus it may take
some time for news to flow through those links.  The vast majority of
sites are connected with higher speed links, and the news flows quite
quickly from site to site.

Usenet currently reaches sites on all 7 continents, and even reaches
"Atlantis" -- the Alvin II submarine has some interesting software
that allows it to receive the Usenet!  The flow statistics from uunet
indicate that it gets about 27 Mb of news per day in over 1800
different newsgroups.  There are undoubtedly many, many more
newsgroups with organizational and regional distribution.  Brian
Reid's arbitron statistics extrpolate 40,000 Usenet sites with over
1.8 million readers; these figures are likely an undercount because of
the widespread use of NNTP and NSF, and the self-selection of survey
sites (e.g., "purdue" reports stats, but underreports by a factor of
several hundred).

-- spaf