Nielsen Struggles To Track Modern Viewing Habits

RobotRunAmok writes "The Nielsen Company has been the principal entity tracking TV shows' popularity, and, by extension, their potential profitability. But as our media consumption practices change, some believe that Nielsen's methods have not kept pace. A new consortium including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, and Walt Disney — along with major advertisers — is calling for the creation of a new audience measurement service, and planning to solicit bids from outside firms by the fourth quarter of this year. Nielsen says they're not worried about so many of their customers ganging up on them, having just invested more than a billion dollars in research to stay modern. Except that today Nielsen announced they would pointedly not be adding weights to DVR households, and that adding weights for the presence of a personal computer or Internet access in under-represented households would provide 'no significant change or enhancement' to its national TV ratings sample. The pundits deride Nielsen's 'archaic' methodology and 'disco-era tactics,' but others scoff that such a consortium will only 'put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.' Stay tuned..."

Comments

Lagging Behind the OS Curve

[stuffduff]

Nielsen has software to participate in their web rating service which though all in java has never been ported to Linux. After a decade of explaining that I also use Linux and not being able to get any action on that front I gave up. If you really want to be a player in the ratings business you need to be where the people are who you want to follow, not changing your sample source to keep the relative value of your investment intact at the expense of being able to follow your demographic. Nielsen wake up! It's no longer the 1950's!