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Nielsen Ratings in the Age of the Internet
alphadogg writes "If everyone started watching '24' or 'CSI' on video iPods or streamed over the Internet — instead of on TV in their living rooms — these top-rated shows would probably go the way of 'Cop Rock.' This is because Nielsen Media Research cannot collect data about what people watch on handheld video-viewing gadgets or from PCs streaming network TV shows. While Nielsen estimates around 90% of TV viewing still happens in homes, it's this burgeoning 10% that TV networks and advertisers are desperate to delve into." Note that this story is obnoxiously spanning 6 pages. For a publication named "Network World" you'd think they'd know better.
if everyone watches them on iPods and what not, they'll be paying for them with cash instead of advertising...
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I've talked to a few people who've been involved in Nielsen ratings, and these were hardly normal people. One family basically only ever watched Charmed on TNT, and then an occasional news broadcast. They really need to start pulling more automated information.
In my home, I have Dish Network, with a dual-tuner DVR. So, I often end up watching two shows from the same timeslot. Yeah, I probably skip through commercials, but I doubt they are getting ratings for both shows at the same time.
The other thing with Nielsen is a failure to get really good demographics. I mean, if Nielsen had a clue, they wouldn't have yanked Family Guy and have to bring it back. They always look at numbers for total viewers, instead of demographics and loyalty. Some of the smaller shows that get yanked could actually charge more for better targetted advertising.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
It doesn't really matter how you are watching the shows, since the only people who counts are the Nielsen households. So, everybody who isn't a Nielsen household could be downloading the shows and it wouldn't impact the ratings.
Je ne parle pas francais.
It's done by either having a "random" group keep diaries, or by observing their TV set's channel settings via remote sensors. Saying they can't do the same thing for handhelds is ludicrous. At the very least, they could count the number of downloads. Duh.
Have you read my blog lately?
Why would this be a problem to anyone other than people involved with the Nielsen Media Research firm? Their business model worked for ages, but it's becoming less and less relevant due to the technological environment.
Piracy aside, producers have a pretty good idea how many DVDs they're selling, how many people are hitting up their authorized web streams, and how many digital video purchases are being made over iTunes and whatnot.
I just don't think we are going to be living in an age where the content providers have to pay Nielsen to sell their own statistics back to them for much longer.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
They may have more reliable data on how many are watching these shows, but they may not necessarily have good data (if any) on who is watching these shows. Companies like to tailor advertisements to a particular demographic, and without that demographic information connected to a show, regardless of how well its doing, I imagine that advertisers would be somewhat reluctant to throw money at it.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
do you think the TV studio would really say pull the plug?
Hell yeah.
The advertisers will only pay if they know thier advertisments are being watched. If a studio or ratings mechanism can not prove the statistics of the viewers beyond a reasonable doubt to the advertisers, the money stops. If the money stops coming in, the shows stop going out.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Interesting the timing of this story, because I received my DirecTV bill yesterday, and see they tacked another $10 on out of the blue. The only time we watch TV is for specific shows (at the moment Battlestar Galactica, Lost and Survivor). We watched the previous 2 seasons of Lost (48 episodes) entirely from downloads off the internet, and we are now watching it "live" since we are caught up with the storyline. So on one hand, had we not been able to download and watch the older shows, we definitely would not be watching the new episodes live. So in that specific case "offline" viewing resulted in an increase in live viewing.
However, considering the cost increase at DirecTV, I'm now seriously considering completely pulling the plug on Satellite / Cable, and just downloading the shows we watch. They are usually available online within an hour or two of airtime. If the shows were available online for purchase, and if they were offered in a format that was conducive to what we want (ie no DRM), we would consider purchasing them. The total cost should still be less than our DirecTV.
Our kids watch more TV than we do, but I still download and burn shows for them to watch. For example, all the Invader Zim episodes, and just in the last few days they've really enjoyed the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons they've only just been introduced to.
So yeah, a change is coming, that's for sure. Right now this type of activity is limited to the more technical minded folks (for example, I download toons in DivX, and re-encode to MPEG1 VCD for the kids to view in the car - a pretty involved multi-step process to get the audio encoded in-synch). However, it won't be much longer until our parents will be doing this too. Recently I was surprised to visit my Aunt and Uncle (typical computer / www type users), to find them involved in an orgy of DVD burning. If they only knew of the availability of content on the net, and were instructed on how to get it to disc, they would certainly join in as well.
The moral is that the networks need to be as unlike the RIAA (and to some extent, the MPAA) as possible and get good (DRM-less), formal online access channels in place to their content ASAP before the general public switches to methods completely outside their control (aka no advertising or Nielsen tracking, etc).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Exactly. It seems like they could get more information from downloads than from normal TV watching. In fact, normal TV watching is skewed even more by DVRs (although off-the-shelf models could still allow remote-monitoring, but with commercial-skip, it all goes out the window anyway).
What they can't detect (without some info from the remote device) is how many times the episode was watched. They definitely can't reliably(/automatically) detect is WHO watched it, thus demographics go out the window.
Of course, it's probably likely that the production studios get less per download than they get per viewer through advertising revenue. How that figures into things is an exercise left to the reader.
Of course it spans 6 pages. That way if you like the article - they get 6 ad views. Perfect for them
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I cheered at first, too. But I cheer less and less with every episode I watch. It's just not the same as it was in the first and second seasons. It relies way too much on its established base of fans to find humor in its self-referencing jokes.
And most of [as] is turning into crap, too. How I long for the old days of Sealab 2021, ATHF, Home Movies, and SG:C2C instead of Squidbillies, Perfect Hair Forever, 12 Oz. Mouse, and Tom Goes to the Mayor. At least they started showing new Harvey Birdman episodes last night. Venture Bros. seems to be going strong, too.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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Why do you still need the advertisers?
Think about it. Traditional TV is a indirect-funding system. Networks pay for TV shows to be made and sell advertising time during the airing of the shows. The typical viewer gets the show for "free" (modulo any cable/satellite costs). The expectation is that the advertising will translate into additional sales for the companies purchasing ads, thus justifying continued purchase of those ads.
Systems like the iTunes store provide a direct funding model between the consumer and the producer. Sure the sales aren't enough at this time to fund the show directly, but if they become great enough to pay the entire cost of the show, why should there be ads?
I think the true story is is Nielsen whining about *their* funding model going away. They make money by helping the networks set rates for their indirect-funding system. If that becomes irrelevant, Nielsen becomes irrelevant.
A couple of times in my life, I've participated in radio surveys. They sent me a green booklet, 8 1/2 x 5 1/2, with dates and times in (I think) 15-minute increments. I was expected to write down, for any time period, what (if any) radio station I listened to during that time -- at a minimum, either the call sign or station number, but there was room for both plus a description.
"At 8pm I watched Deal or No Deal on TV. At 9pm, I downloaded and watched The Simpsons on my computer. At 9:30pm, I watched Batman on my iPod."
Would this setup not solve the issue of watching shows on non-televisions?
--hymie!
viewing diaries!
Boxes set up in people's homes cost money to make and money to install. It is far cheaper and easier to ask people to keep a simple diary of what they watch and then collect the diaries. I would'nt be surprised if the diaries are kept online now instead of in dead-tree editions in the home.
Hey, there's a great programming project!
Somebody hack Neilson to grab and distort the online diaries. >8^D Maybe we can get Star Trek: Enterprise back on the air. >8^P
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Saying that Nielsen ""cannot collect data" on this is clearly false. Yes, it's true their automated data collection boxes can't get it.
But my household was chosen to be a one-month Nielsen family a couple of months ago, and they sent us a journal in which were asked (and payed) to log each TV show we watched on TV.
We thought this was particularly silly to only ask us to log what TV shows we saw on TV, rather than log every source of video we watched, from going out to the movies, to silly 1-minute clips on YouTube, to Amazon Fishbowl, to bittorrented TV shows, to movies or TV shows on DVD we checked out of the library.
As it happens, we hardly watch any TV, and we had company that week, it was a hot summer week and we don't have air conditioning, and it was summer reruns. We never once turned on the television that week. Although I actually didn't need those qualifiers, it's not uncommon for us not to turn on the TV all week. Most of the TV shows we watch, we watch on our computer on DVD's we get from the library. Which they didn't ask us to write down.
But it would have been just as easy for them if they had. Perhaps they won't get as accurate information if they ask people to keep their own journals instead of logging things automatically. But if they pay people well, and maybe even send out some largely automated electronic devices that allow people easily search for and click on what they watched (when possible), they can certainly still get this data. There was a "commentary" section, in which we got an opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
There was a "commentary" section, in which we told them that most of the video we watch, including TV shows, is not broadcast TV. We also took the opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
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We were a Neilsen family for a while and I have no idea how they made sense of the data. Little to no sports, random shows late at night, no reality shows. Basically nothing that was particularly popular or current ( except maybe Letterman).
The 4 main family members (age, sex) were keyed in permanently, but guests had to be entered in when they were over. I always enjoyed keying friends in as 85 year old women, 3 year olds, etc. Of course we'd get sick of it and just leave the TV on a channel and wonder off. I can't imagine what they thought of an 85 year old women watching a Sailor Moon marathon.
Plus product placement can still play a big role for advertisers even on iTunes, where there are no commercials. It would be interesting to see if product placement would work better on a generation if they weren't bombarded with ads all the time. Maybe they would notice the products more.
Of course product placement wouldn't work on a show like LOST, since all the products say Dharma.
Can I bum a sig?
Either way the studios need money coming in. Selling entertainment is no different then selling a physical widget. You make money from it and you can keep selling it. If the studios can produce a show and make enough money by selling it without advertisements, they will continue to do so.
There are many hurdles to ignoring traditional television though. Getting the initial audience is probably the biggest one. As it stands now, shows become "popular" by being in your face during or close to "prime time" spots. Once shows become popular and desired, the studios can expand the offering to direct paid downloads (with and without advertising), syndication, DVD of seasons, etc.. Becoming popular without the initial television spot and attempting to maintain a profit with only the secondary routes mentioned would be a significant risk. Maybe times will change or there will be a balance between the two.
Another point is the television advertising business model as well. Before the internet and banner ads, the advertising business had no real way to measure the impressions and effectiveness of blanket advertising. There are many assumptions and ad prices and time slots are based on nothing concrete. With direct downloads and feedback from internet based downloads, advertisers can get a better understanding of the effectiveness of their ads. This may cause a problem as some companies find out their ads may be useless and pull out much quicker then they would normally have using assumptions of effectiveness.
Bottom line, I agree that any show making money by any method will continue to be produced. How they will make that money is the tricky part.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
By selling info on what everyone is watching, when, and all those statistics.
Information is the commodity of the internet, it seems.
Why do you still need the advertisers?
You mean like the original reason they created cable? You would pay for the cable and not have ads?
Well... That didn't last too long.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You still need the advertisers because iTunes as a venue works only when they have commercials for the shows they're selling. If the show isn't broadcast on TV, plus the myriad commercials advertising it on the other shows, they'll get far fewer downloads.
Attention is still the most valuable commodity on the Internet: the user's time is the limiting factor in everything you want to sell. TV shows are expensive, and they are only profitable if they get many, many viewers. Music can be made on the cheap, with only a few hundred in equipment plus the band and producer, and it can be done in a garage. TV shows require sets (hard to build in your back yard), plus makeup artists/gaffers/standby carpenters/etc.
This may all shift, slowly, if people start to lose their tolerance for commercials. There's a big discontinuity in the shift, for the first TV show advertised on broadcast TV but available only via iTunes. Meantime, there will be TV, and there will be advertisers, and there will be Nielsens. I'm glad the Nielsen corporation is cowering though. I can't wait until we can reclaim that bandwidth (I mean the stuff allocated for HDTV) from those useless bastards at the network affiliates.
Nielsen ratings are worthless anyways. Most CATV systems can collect better and more accurate data themselves from the set top boxes and they are starting to use it for demographics.
Tivo,Replay they both sell their demographics as higher-quality than nielsen data.
Nielsen data was not really relevant anymore when I was still working in advertising.. The sales people used the data from the CATV systems to sell ad's.
Telling a customer that this timeslot or show has X rating is crap compared to telling the customer that XXX,XXX local people were watching the TV channel at X:XXpm when your ad aired.
Nielsen can not give that kind of data.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It is unaccurate and, as I understand it, everyone in the industry knows it.
Not only do they not measure internet viewing, but they don't measure dorm rooms where hundreds of thousands of college students live, or public viewing like sports bars which are packed full of people watching sports every weekend.
Not being able to measure viewing of downloaded shows isn't an entirely new problem, but just makes an existing problem worse.
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When I was growing up in the 70's and early 80's I regularly got disappointed in television. Not because of crappy programming, per se, but it happened with disturbing regularity that some network would get a new show that really piqued my interest, and I'd get right into the show and then it would be quickly cancelled, often after only half a season. Anyways, it was always on account of "poor ratings", and this happened to me so many times while I was growing up, I've completely lost count... but I'd figure probably between 15 to 20 times in my childhood alone. Anyways, I always figured that maybe there just weren't enough people with my tastes that were hooked up into the ratings system.
Then fast forward a couple of decades to 1999. I have my own family, with 4 kids of my own, so we had a really full house. One day someone came to our door who worked for Nielson, the ratings company. This person told us that our house had been selected to participate in the Nielson ratings and asked me if we'd like to participate.
I felt like I had freakin' won the lottery... I was flooded by memories of all those times I was growing up and having shows that I really liked cancelled due to poor ratings and thought that I'd _finally_ get a chance to have a voice... and my favorite shows would not be cancelled. I was extremely interested in the offer, and after talking with the rest of the family with it to see how they would feel about it, I said yes, we'd agree.
They proceeded to hook up their ratings equipment to every television, vcr, and video switch in the house... and connected that to our phone line. They told us it would collect data, and then use our phone line once every night or so to connect to their computer and inform them of our viewing habits. The system was designed so that it would only try to use our phone when it was not in use, and would automatically terminate if another phone was picked up, so it would not interefere with our regular phone use. The video equipment was fairly straightforward... there was one logging unit per television, which Nielson told us we needed to log into whenever we turned on the TV, regardless of what we were turning the TV on for... be it watching a DVD or video, watching regular television, or anything else that needed the TV, we had to log in. Each of us was assigned a single button on the device and all we had to do to log in was press that one button. To log out, we just neede to press the button again, and everybody would automatically be logged out if the television was turned off. The logging device would automatically examine what channel or input device the television was tuned to, as well as the settings of any external video switches to determine if we were watching television or just watching a movie or doing something else with the TV. It would also, regardless of whether the television was on or not, log what channels the VCR recorded... although it could not assign any particular household members to what the VCR did, so I guess the VCR was assigned a "general" category by their system. We didn't have to worry about it, at any rate.
So... what did we get out of this? Well, not a whole lot... we'd get a cash-back rebate on any new video equipment we purchased, regardless of the price (although the rebate was not much, it was still nice), and of course for me, I had a personal interest in participating in the Nielson ratings system... a chance to _finally_ make a difference in the ratings system, as we were told that each person in our household would represent several thousand actual viewers.
Okay... fast forward a few years again, to 2003. Television is utter tripe. We hardly watch any of it at all, because there's just so little of it that's any good. But then a show comes on UPN that looks intriguing. I watch the premiere, and I am instantly hooked. I tell my family about it and the following week we are all logged into the Nielson system watching the show. Everybody in the household love
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
According to this site:
2 0060124Apple55CentsAndAdvertising.html
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-
The network/production company makes $1.44 cents per $1.99 download for a tv show. This compares to an "estimated 57 cents in advertising revenue per user generated under the current model." They make over 2.5x as much per download as they do from television.