TV Networks Hide Bad Ratings With Typos, Report Says (cnet.com)

A report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers. From a report: It's described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show's average overall rating. The report says the practice was initially used sparingly -- for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event.

Comments

easy idea to solve the fraud.

[computerchimp]

Shows are broadcast on a predetermined schedule.
A show gets a zero until something is submitted.
that will get the spelling right.

Anyways it is pretty dumb that Nelson has not been able to vet this out.

Re:Nielsen hasn't figured this trick out by now?

[Tablizer]

And they haven't employed technical solutions to correct for typos and collect the correct data?

Imagine if Slashdot was like that, producing duplicate story entries. We'd think terribly of them and defect.

I worked at Nielsen

[muninn]

After working a few years at Nielsen (in data-heavy development roles), this sort of issue is what prompted me to leave. Trying to convince them that ensuring data integrity is worthwhile was an uphill battle. Sure, they have lots of valuable data... but it's all dirty as heck. Now they think they can just throw some machine learning on top of it to fix everything right as rain. We can all guess how well that will go!