Google to Compete with Nielsen?

An anonymous reader writes "Jason Lee Miller thinks that Nielsen Media Research's ambitious new plan for measuring all types of video audiences could put it into competition with everyone's favorite company: Google. From the article: 'The Mountain View's next potential rival: Nielsen Media Research, the audience measurement company that has held a virtual monopoly in the sector for decades. And it shouldn't be surprising. Google's MO is information collection and research.'"

Comments

Sounds more like

[Zeinfeld]

Nielsen is attempting to compete with Google.

I doubt Google is going to be conducting research surveys or distributing their own rating monitoring boxes.

The part they are going to overlap on is a small part of the publicly visible loss leader.

Re:Sounds more like

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt Google is going to be conducting research surveys or distributing their own rating monitoring boxes.

With video.google.com, the audience comes to them rather than the other way around.

Re:Sounds more like

[Zeinfeld]

With video.google.com, the audience comes to them rather than the other way around.

Nielsen make their money conducting market research surveys.

Re:Sounds more like

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt Google is going to be conducting research surveys or distributing their own rating monitoring boxes.

Actually, they already have: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/10/132922 7

With a simple application, they can turn your laptop (pre-deployed) into a ratings monitor.

Re:Sounds more like

[apnielsen]

Nielsen make their money conducting market research surveys.

ACNielsen makes their money conducting market research surveys. Nielsen Media Research makes their money by selling overnight TV viewing data to networks, advertisers, and whoever else wants to pay for it.

Good idea!

[nurhussein]

Perhaps then the demographics will represent the hip, happening and geeky crowd as well as whatever boring old fogies Nielson represents. I hate it when my favourite shows are cancelled because "ratings were down".

Then again I'm not 'Merican, so I have no idea why good shows get cancelled *cough*Firefly*cough*. I just know that they do, and the dumb ones remain (latest reality show, WHO WANTS TO MARRY A MIDGET MILLIONAIRE APPRENTICE?)

Re:Good idea!

[bartyboy]

Sounds to me like you're more upset about the cancelling of Firefly than the Nielson rating system.

Nielson samples a very wide demographic, not just "boring old fogies". You can read about it here. The wikipedia article also brings up the point that their research system is not perfect, but it's close enough to give advertisers a picture of who's watching what. If it wasn't, Nielson wouldn't be in the TV ratings system for long.

Re:Good idea!

[qmVSE*w!7e,QF(,]

Exactly... Nielsen looks at EVERYBODY, because there's a market for everybody's information. Furthermore, it's a joke to think that Google is going to compete with Nielsen as **Google sells advertising**. This is not an unbiased source. The reason that Nielsen even exists is that [insert Ford, Apple, or any other buyer of advertising time here] is not going to take [insert NBC's, Comedy Central's, or any other seller of advertising time here] word for it about how many people are watching their shows. Apple wants to hear from an unbiased souce that X million people are watching ABC during the period for which Apple is buying advertising time.

Re:Good idea!

[drsquare]

Nielson samples a very wide demographic, not just "boring old fogies".

It only samples a very small demographic: people who want to be monitored.

Re:Good idea!

[Distinguished Hero]

Perhaps then the demographics will represent the hip, happening and geeky crowd as well as whatever boring old fogies Nielson represents.
I'm no expert in the matter, but if Nielson is doing its job properly, they would be using a representative sample of the population of T.V. viewers (of which you and your friends are but a small fraction) or a representative sample of the population of T.V. viewers willing to pay for stuff (of which you and your friends may be an even smaller fraction).

Then again I'm not 'Merican, so I have no idea why good shows get cancelled *cough*Firefly*cough*. I just know that they do, and the dumb ones remain
I'm not a "'Merican" (great, even more illiteracy) either, but it seems rather peculiar that you would insult the very people who produced the entertainment you so enjoyed to begin with.

If you truly want to know why "good shows get cancelled," the explanation is rather simple. In a free market, you make money by giving people what they want. Ideally, you want to give as many people as possible things that they really want (and are therefore willing to pay high prices). I would wager that not that many people wanted to watch Firefly, and those that did, did not value it high enough to pay a sufficient price to make it worthwhile.

P.S. If you truly want decent sci-fi, I suggest you stop being intellectually lazy and visit your local library.

Re:Good idea!

[apnielsen]

Is Nielsen doing it differently now? We had a Nielsen box a few years ago, and it had buttons on it you were supposed to press to indicate which members of the family were watching at any given time.

No. People meters have had the buttons since 1991 (possibly before that too).

It was fun for the first couple hours, just because of the novelty, but then it got real old real quick. Of course, it was terribly inaccurate. People forget to press their buttons when they start or stop watching.

Pressing buttons is currently the only accredited way of making sure you're actually watching. Just because you're in the same room as a TV set doesn't mean you're watching. As you point out, it also introduces a certain amount of inaccuracy. "Button fatigue" is a hot topic in Research, and they're looking at everything from adapting A/P Meters to installing facial recognition devices to fix it.

We'd press extra buttons to add fictitious viewers for shows we really liked. Etc.

That's possibly why you're no longer a Nielsen home. We do notice these things, believe it or not. ;)

Each day, Nielsen publishes an install count and an intab count. Installs are all the homes with people meters. Intabs are those homes that aren't trying to play Tetris on their set tops.

Re:Good idea!

[riflemann]

It only samples a very small demographic: people who want to be monitored.

And these are the people they're after. If you're concerned about privacy and not wanting your viewing habits watched, then you're probably too smart to be swayed by TV advertising anyway.

Re:Good idea!

[kimvette]

Nielsen does not look at everybody. They only look at people who still have land lines. You can only become a "Nielsen Family" by invitation, and those invitations are via telephone calls. I have only a cellular phone, and when I bother to get 'net access at home, my "land line" will be VOIP through the office. So, I have exactly ZERO chance of ever being invited by Nielsen to participate in the rating system.

It sucks, too. I'm in the target market for most advertisers (by age, income, and interests) and because of me and others like me who don't want to pay Verizon/etc. monopolies money for an immobile phone, we lose out on great shows like Futurama, Arrested Development, Firefly, and other shows which are really probably not reflected accurately in the ratings system.

What Google should do (I didn't RTFA yet so please pardon me if TFA mentions this) is team up with cable providers and track viewership by both digital cable (the cable company DOES know what you tune to with a digital receiver, how do you think you get that nice MPEG stream?) and by surveys/journals. DVRs should be included, and MythTV plugins (OSS of course!) should be made available as well so that timeshifting is tracked accurately. This would provide far better, near-realtime feedback to ratings systems, and not only will they be able to accurately gauge who watches what, but they can also know which advertisements were skipped, how often advertisements were played, and also how many times the timeshifted program was re-viewed. They would be able to know via survey (perhaps the cable box/DVR/MythTV software could pop up and optional survey) which family member (or friend, or guest) watched the show, how often they watch the show, and why did they skip the advertisements? Maybe they'd learn that, oh, say, advertising McDonalds during a fitness-oriented show does not pay off at ALL (or you just find oh, say, Bob's Discount Furniture ads to be totally obnoxious), but airing a Lexus advertisement during that same timeslot does. Advertising could be more targeted, therefore more interesting to the target viewers, and entice viewers to not skip them. Advertisements would also likely become far more entertaining (remember Outpost.com's ads? Those were better comedy than most SNL sketches lately).

The Nielsen system is a fucking joke.

Google's MO

[tommertron]

Google's MO is information collection and research.

... and word processors. Oh, and web accelerators.

Re:Google's MO

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's MO is information collection and research.
... and word processors. Oh, and web accelerators.

...that, in turn, collect more information and produce better research results.

Re:Google's MO

[ciroknight]

Web accelerators and Word Processors lend themselves brilliantly to information collection and research. Accelerators help the company to see what pages are loading slowly and why, word processors help them see what people are writing about and technologies of dealing with it (such as different compression algorithms, search algorithms, etc).

Add spreadsheet in there and maybe Google's trying to find a better way of extracting metadata from Spreadsheets. Add blogs in there and maybe Google's trying to find a better way to tell a Blog from an ordinary webpage to improve search results.

As you can see, each element lends itself to Google's core business: helping people find things.

Long tail

[KayEss]

Wonder if either of them will actually manage to get the long tail of consumption recorded? Then maybe the rest of us won't have to put up with all of the rubbish that passes entertainment in the mass market.

stupid people = stupid shows

[Bluude]

Yeah, but even in a society where everyone gets a vote, you are still going to have around 20% that like reality shows, 15% that enjoy game shows, 20% that like daytime talkshows, 20% that like medical drama, and 20% that enjoy cop drama. So even in pefect world where everyone is counted, we will still have a lot of crap on tv because there are a lot of stupid people in the world that find comfort in watching the same old crap they have always watched.

Heck sometimes I think those people are threatened when a new show like firefly comes on. they just don't know how to classify it so they don't bother watching it.

Re:stupid people = stupid shows

[thelost]

while people do watch dreadful shows I've found that the last reason is that they are stupid. Among my friends the number 1 reason for watching crap TV is that they've spent the whole day working/studying and they just want to switch their brain off. The aforementioned tv genres are pretty good for tuning in and dropping out to.

Re:stupid people = stupid shows

[algerath]

GP doen't need to point to medical/cop dramas to prove his point about a lot of stupid people. One just needs to go to a public place and observe for a while, it becomes obvious very quickly.

Someone who is going off on someone else for being an "arrogant elitist" should not start a sentence with "people like you" and then call them stupid.

Yup, I am sure Firefly was cancelled due to his attitude. That must have been it. I bet mine didn't help either.

I don't watch commercials, according to your logic I am smart, Thank You. I don't think commercial watching is an accurate predictor of intellect. I have seen people I know staring blankly at the set watching some crap about cheetos or whatever and realized why advrtising is such a big business.

just my .02

Algerath

Google builds geographical barriers on Internet

[Elixon]

I'm sure that audience is coming to Video.Google.com, but is google coming to the audience?

This is what google served me instead of the clips in "Music Videos" menu:

"We're sorry, but the provider of this video has not authorized Google to display this video in your location.
To see more videos visit our home page."

Does it matter that I'm from EU?

Re:Google builds geographical barriers on Internet

[maxume]

So if the provider of a video doesn't want to show it in the EU, Google should refuse to host it at all?

It's the same as Apple and DRM; I'm not buying it, but it doesn't offend me that they use it, the RIAA wasn't coming to the table otherwise.

Already happening

[apnielsen]

Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.

I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.

What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.

US TV needs a better rating mechanism

[91degrees]

Perhaps it will actually stop the freekin' weird US scheduling.

Seriously - Why do the studios and advertisers rate the ratings so highly? The system is inherently gamable, so the very act of gathering statistics affects the schedules. This is why they have "sweeps". Is there somethign magical about that time? Nope. It's just when the people who are doing the counting decide they're going to look. If it wasn't for this, there woukld eb a much more regular spread of quality programming throughout the year, rather than the bursts of new episodes followded by weeks of repeats.

Google juggernaut =bad?

[spineboy]

Is anyone else getting a little freaked out at how much Google is attempting to do on the web? It does stuff well, and a free market indicates that it is doing well, but I worry about a monopoly eventually. Papers and radios have limitations on how much of the audience that their company can reach, so as to prevent a monopolistic control over the information that people receive. The internet should be no different. How to enforce that though? - Make Google break up like Ma Bell did in the 70's? And at what point? Not yet I think, but the time will come soone I think.

Re:Google juggernaut =bad?

[rm69990]

Google does have a high usage of their search engine, but seriously, name me a single other product Google has that has higher usage than their competitors. Gmail? Nope. GCalendar? Nope. Google Earth/Maps, recent surveys say Mapquest still beats them out. Google News? Yahoo! News and CNN.com still have higher readership.

Oh, and it's not illegal to have a monopoly, what ever gave you that idea? It IS illegal to use your monopoly to push into new markets while pushing others out, or to use anticompetitive market behaviour. Considering most of Google's products aren't even linked to on their homepage, please explain to me how Google is doing either.

Hell, Google doesn't even lock their customers in. I use Google Calendar, Gmail and Google News, yet I still use ask.com and search.yahoo.com, direct competitors to Google's cash cow, almost as often as I use Google search itself.

Google better take care of existing biz first

[The Mutant]

I've noticed Google page loads seem a hell of a lot slower lately than say one year ago. I'm not sure why, some folks blame Analytics, but it seems that sometime front page loading drags. I've turned off personalised search and it's about the same.

It's gotten so bad at times that I'm able to open a second tab, load then execute the same search on yahoo! before Google presents its front page.

In a recent IHT article, Schmidt first admitted problems, mentioning "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." .

The Register also raised several complaints from users about the (negative) impact of recent changes.

I think Google should take a pause, and reinforce their core business before heading out to capture new markets. Their aggressive growth strategy threatens to turn them into the Microsoft of internet computing; get there first, capture the market and worry about quality later.

Re:Google better take care of existing biz first

[yellowbkpk]

I hit the Google page at least 100 times a day and over the past year it has never taken more than half a second to appear. The times that it was slower than 300-400ms were when my net connection at school was being flooded by virus attacks.

Maybe your location has something to do with it? Have you tried connecting with multiple net connections?

This won't improve TV at all...

[boredandblogging.com]

Considering MySpace now is in the top 10 list by traffic volume, Google and Nielsen are just going to show the need for more stupid reality tv and medical dramas.

Nielson is slipping...

[7Prime]

My boss (I work as a commercial producer for a TV station), is starting to consider dropping Nielson, as many other TV stations around the country are doing. Having a Nielson rating tends to do more harm than good (and trust me, in the rural area I live in, there is NOONE else even close to being able to compete with us for viewership). Large corporations, while still looking to Nielson for guidence, have been doing so less and less. From what I hear, it's quickly becoming one of the biggest concerns in the broadcast industry. So this move to branch out into other fields doesn't surprise me.