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Neilsen Introduces New Way To Measure Gamer Metrics
GameDaily reports on a couple of new ways that Neilsen is trying to stay with the times. Game usage and tracking have always been hard for them, and they're rolling out two new strategies to consumers. The first requires participation on the part of developers: a 'tag' that can be built into software to register usage with the Neilsen folks. An initial attempt at this was tried in 2005, and never got off the ground. They're now trying again. The other is a bit more clever, and is usable on multiple forms of entertainment. The blog 'We Can Fix That with Data' did some research into the organization's 'Portable People Meters': "The Portable People Meter, developed by Arbitron Inc., is a pager-sized device that is carried by a representative panel of television viewers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that broadcasters embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by BBM and Arbitron. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes to BBM for tabulation. The Portable People Meter can measure exposure to any electronic media, which has audio that can be encoded - television, cable, and radio, even cinema advertising and in-store media."
I am of the understanding that they can can barely do television right, why are they not concentrating on that first?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
GameDaily reports it's spelled 'Nielsen'.
Thats a neat concept at least. I don't see exactly why you would need Nielsen ratings for games... they aren't loaded with ads yet.
I've always wanted to get paid for my television watching habits (come on Nielsen, what about the demographic of people who watches less than 5 minutes of TV a day?!), but been turned off by having to keep a paper account of those... it would be neat if it was automated.
Didn't RTFA.. Was it a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' portable people meter?
If so, those have been around since at least the late 50s...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
An opt-in system that requires people to remember to carry around a pager-sized device will never be "representative".
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
http://www.xfire.com/
Much better statistics and much more relevant to gamers.
This is an interesting idea, having a device which will automatically detect what you're watching but since it's based on an encoded signal, the underlying system would be extremly vulnerable. The user doesn't seem to be able to check what he's been recorded as watching/listening so if you had the device with you in any public area someone could play a signal for a tv show (for example) to artificially boost it's ratings.
Heck, you'd probably end up with some enthusiast writing a virus to change the signal on popular games to support their personal cause and once that happens it's only a matter of time before someone will make a business of artificially inflating ratings. It'd be SEO all over again, but for real money by artificially increasing the rates advertisers pay to advertise during a particular.
You might think the secrecy of who's a rater would protect them, but as well all know from spam, that people will go after the 0.001% who are in the program even if it means inconviencing the 99.999% who aren't.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
For T.V. I can see how this is useful; you don't necessarily purchase an individual channel. Being a hardcore gamer myself I would be a little upset knowing they are data mining me AFTER I already purchased their product. Their data should show in sales and not track gaming tendencies of it's user base.
die hard