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Written by: Ian Hickman
How many times does the average paper get read?
From the web logs we know that there have 129463 distinct downloads of the 18227papers that have been
deposited into the archive after 24th August. 129463 / 18227 = 7.103 downloads per paper. This is over
the 260 days that we have logs for. If we scale this figure up to calculate the number of downloads per year we get :
365 / 260 = 1.404
1.404 * 7.103 = 9.97. Almost 10 downloads per paper per year.
These are the figures for one of thirteen mirrors of the site. If we assume that all of the mirrors have roughly the same amount of
traffic then their will be 9.97 * 13 = 139.58 about 130 downloads per paper per year.
The main site arXiv.org gets just over 30,000 separate users a week,
compared to 2062 of the UK mirror. If we scale the number of downloads based on the number of distinct users per week,
we find that a paper on the main site would get downloaded about 30000 / 2062 = 14.55 time more traffic
14.55 * 9.97 = 145times.
145 + 130 = 275 downloads per paper per year (from all sites).
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