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Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall US audience -- should it be shut down too?

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Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles.

No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?

Some comment service providers like Disqus only load the comments if the user scrolls to them, while others only load if the user clicks on a button. If these services' analytics tools don't track this, they should. I'm much more interested in how many people interact with the comments section. This includes posting, lurking, voting, and flagging.

> ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly

~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.

Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet:

http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Anecdata: a few years ago I did a road trip through NV, UT, and CO, and for large swathes of that trip, the only radio station that wasn't glassy-eyed christian pap ("if we make 20k donations, it can ONLY by god's will!" and similar) was NPR. If I lived in the area, it would be the only sane choice for radio...

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