Our Ratings, Ourselves

Ant writes "This long New York Times article (10 pages; no registration required) reports on the mismeasure of television (TV)." From the article: "One of the great contradictions of modern American life is that almost everyone watches TV while almost no one agrees anymore about what it really means to watch television....when it comes to figuring out how many of us are watching these shows, and whether we're paying attention while we're watching and even whether we're actually noticing the advertisements among the shows we may or may not be watching -- well, this is where things get tricky..."

Comments

Re:OMG long article

[thebes]

Maybe this is some kinda weird test by the NYT. Since when did they start having articles you could read without going through their silly registration process?

It's called partner=rssnyt. Why more don't post NYT articles with it is beyond me.

Re:My experiences with advertising

[periol]

A simple little url trick you can do is to advertise with a different entry page than you're main page. Say mydomain.com/google, with that page redirecting to your main site. At that point, you pretty much know any traffic to that page is from people who clicked on your advertisement, so you know just who's interested. It's not perfect, but it sounds like step-up from where you are now. Remember, with advertising, it's impossible to know whether or not it's worthwhile if you're not getting the right information.

Re:Impact of TV on my life

[dustinbarbour]

And where is the science and history on TV?

In Las Vegas those channels reside in the following locations:

• Discovery Channel (though it is generally lacking now - OCC anyone?): 25
• History Channel (love it): 43
• Discovery Science (what the Discovery Channel was supposed to be): 102
• Discovery Times: 104
• Military Channel (Discovery CHannel for military history, etc): 105
• Discovery HD (digital subscription): 700
• PBS HD (same as above): 730 (?)

There are others, I'm sure. I just don't watch enough TV to remember them all off hand. So, the channels do exist.

Maybe we will get a science channel once cable hits channel 700.

Such seems to be the case.

Re:"Free" TV is a terrible deal

[Weirsbaski]

Common CPM for TV ads is $10, meaning one cent per viewer. The network gets a penny to show you a 30 second ad. If you watch 5 hours of TV, you will see an hour of those ads, and they get $1.20.

In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal.

By that logic, if networks upped their fee to 25 cents per ad per viewer (which amounts to $30 per hour of ads per viewer), then the deal automatically becomes a great one for viewers?

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT

[disposable60]

Never forget, YOU are the PRODUCT being sold to the advertisers. The shows are produced to maximize sales. Of you. To advertisers.

Re:Invisible advertising

[timeOday]

I found this thread interesting enough to look for some info, and I'm responding to what you wrote because it confirms what you said.

This is not from some media critic, or academic, but from the "Cable TV Ad Beaureau":

Our audience is deciding what they want. MTV's median age is exactly when a majority of young American adults begin to form life-long brand loyalties. Young adults 15-17 are excited consumers and extremely impressionable. Now is the time to influence their choices. 12-34 year olds have higher brand recall and more recognition than 35-49 year olds. In fact 69% make their purchasing decisions based on brand name, not price.

In short, they're looking to build lifelong loyalties, and hitting up the demographic with the highest cash-to-brains ratio.

Re:My experiences with advertising

[spagetti_code]

How do they do that?

Its pretty cool. After a program is recorded, a process starts up that scans the video file for what looks like ads. I believe it detects these by finding slow fades to black, still pictures and logos appearing.

When I get to watch a program (usually the next day, or a few days later), all the ads are gone.

It does occasionally get it wrong, and for those occasions (or when I am watching it as its being recorded) I have the trusty skip-30 and back-5 buttons.

Re:"Free" TV is a terrible deal

[Capt'n Hector]

You too make a good point. But I think the grandparent was saying this: instead of watching that hour of advertising, you work for an hour and make anywhere between $5 and $50 dollars. Beyond that, fuck you. You send that money to the TV networks, and they give you not just 5 hours as they would had you sat in front of the TV watching ads but something more like 50 hours for the same amount of time.