April 16 "How Can We Improve?" Survey Results

ast month we asked some simple questions of our readers to determine what direction they want to see OS/2 e-Zine! go. While these surveys are done mainly for internal purposes, we assume many of you might be interested in what your fellow readers have to say. So we present to you here the complete results of our questionnaire.

Answers to our survey were accepted from April 16th until May 1st. We had a total of 582 replies to our questionnaire with 31 "spoiled" entries (replies were considered "spoiled" if they did not contain an e-mail address, if all questions were not answered or if they were duplicates). This left 551 valid replies. The results were as follows:

Do prefer advertisements in OS/2 e-Zine! ?

Advertisements have been, at different times and in different places, the scourge of modern civilization, and the saviour of it. Some rally against advertisements, flicking channels as soon as one appears. Others support near-100% advertising industries, such as large computer "catalog" magazines whose main content (and value!) is often their vast range of mail order advertisements.

In the end, any good advertisement conveys information to potential customers about a company or product. OS/2 users are probably more starved for this sort of information than mainstream computer users because of the relatively few outlets advertisers have to display their ads. This is most certainly why you told us last month that our current ad amount is acceptable (61.3% of readers picked this option). Combined with the group who asked for more ads (19.1%), that makes 80.4% of readers who would like at least as many ads as we already display each month.

Do you read OS/2 e-Zine! offline (either occasionally or regularly)?

As most readers of OS/2 e-Zine! know, each month we prepare "offline" versions of our magazine. These ASCII and HTML copies are mostly intended to assist readers who are held hostage by their government's telecommunications policies -- many European citizens pay per-minute fees just to make a local call to their ISP, and then pay their ISP on top of that! Rather than stay online, these people often choose to get the goods and get offline.

Last month, we found exactly how many of our readers this description applies to. While not many people seemed to exclusively read our ASCII copies (only 1.1% of our respondents), this may be a misleading result. Because the online survey forms are just that -- online forms, they do not translate to plain ASCII text. For this reason, our ASCII copies each month contain only pointers to the survey forms on the WWW. This may mean that readers of the ASCII copies chose not to participate in our survey, specifically because of their preferred medium.

However, while the single largest group of readers (58.4%) told us they did all their reading online, those who did some reading offline still accounted for a significant percentage of readers (40.6%). The largest category of this group (36.8%), reads only offline HTML copies, which are nearly exact duplicates of what we present online each month. Obviously we will not be abandoning our regular offline copies.

What yearly subscription fee would you pay for automatic delivery of OS/2 e-Zine! to your email box every two weeks?

Over the years many people have suggested that we charge a subscription fee and provide automatic delivery of OS/2 e-Zine! to readers' mail boxes. This is something we have considered for a long time but have never been able to decide exactly how to implement. In order to help sort out our thoughts, we asked you what you thought a fair price was.

Not surprisingly, considering the nature of the Internet, and considering OS/2 e-Zine! 's long history as a completely free publication, almost one third of respondents (32.1%) said they would not pay any fee for auto-delivery of our publication. However, almost one half of you (49.1%) said you would pay some fee to have issues delivered every two weeks. The bulk of those (39.1%) indicated they would pay US$15 or less.

With this positive response, we will definitely be investigating auto-delivery methods in the coming weeks. Expect an initial offering soon!

Complete Survey Results

Do prefer advertisements in OS/2 e-Zine! ?

Category	Count	Percentage
I want to see more ads	105	19.1%
The current amount of ads is good	338	61.3%
Less ads is better but I like some	37	6.7%
I do not want to see any ads	18	3.3%
I have no opinion / I'm not sure	53	9.6%
TOTAL	551	100.0%

Do you read OS/2 e-Zine! offline (either occasionally or regularly)?

Category	Count	Percentage
I read the ASCII copies offline	6	1.1%
I read the HTML copies offline	203	36.8%
I read both HTML and ASCII copies offline	15	2.7%
I do not read offline	322	58.4%
I have no opinion / I'm not sure	5	0.9%
TOTAL	551	99.9%

What yearly subscription fee would you pay for automatic delivery of OS/2 e-Zine! to your email box every two weeks?

Category	Count	Percentage
I would not pay any fee	177	32.1%
I would pay less than US$15	80	14.6%
I would pay US$15	135	24.5%
I would pay US$30	39	7.1%
I would pay US$50	7	1.3%
I would pay US$100	0	0.0%
I would pay more than US$100	0	0.0%
Other: US$20	4	0.7%
Other: US$24	3	0.5%
Other: Cdn$35	1	0.2%
Other: Cdn$50	1	0.2%
I have no opinion / I'm not sure	104	18.9%
TOTAL	551	100.1%

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