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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."
Their new technology (referenced in the article as "PeopleMeter") allows them to passively monitor all the audible marks that you hear during the day. They listen for encoded signals in the audible streams of radio stations, television stations, retail outlets and (now) video games. This lets them count how many eyes (or ears, as it were) are on a specific media stream at a given time which, in turn, sets the "demand" for the advertising market. World of Warcraft will be going up against Howard Stern and Boston Legal.
I'll leave it at that; but I'm sure the hackers in us all are VERY curious as to how this encoding works... no? :->
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
If you subscribe to digital cable, the cable company has better data on your TV habits than Neilsen will ever have. Same goes for TiVo. Neilsen's days are numbered, unless they can move into a new market, which is where the gaming thing comes from.
Unfortunately, there are already services out there that allow gamers to "share" what games they are playing in real time (i.e. "User Satanicpuppy is currently playing: Galactic Civilizations II"), so their online gamer friends can keep up with what they're doing...It's almost trivial in implementation...Just run a small client to occasionally check running applications for known games. Such a service could easily grab usage information from their user base to generate stats.
Neilsen is just a fossil at this point; their information gathering is second rate compared to what's publicly available now. They would say that their demographic information is better and that they have the ability to generate a more representative sample set, but this could be overcome through the use of a much wider sample set, something these other services are more capable of getting.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Hey! I've got over 10,000 XBox Gamer Points and I'm proud of it! Err, wait...
Yeah, we -do- seem to need meaningless numbers to validate our existance. It's wired into who we are. I'm about the most non-competitive person I know, and I still feel the need to 'win' from time to time.
But that really has nothing to do with these ratings, does it? These are for personal edification, they are to measure the success of shows/games so that networks know what is popular and what is not. IF the system worked right, maybe we wouldn't be stuck with so many idiotic shows. It's a big 'maybe', though, as most people that watch a lot of TV watch it whether there's anything good on or not. I can't stand to have my time wasted like that, so my DVR and I are on a first-name basis now. This is a particularly sucky time of the year, apparently... There's only a couple shows running that I care about at all, and they both started up recently, I think. (Eureka and the lastest Doctor Who, and I haven't figured out exactly when DW started on Scifi, and how it managed to get past me.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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...
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