As a subscriber of TV Guide on-line (i.e. they send me a daily newsletter) I keep somewhat up to date with the latest news/gossip. May Sweeps have passed, the seasons are ending, shows are being cancelled or renewed accordingly.
I’ve often wondered about this - how does the Neilson rating system work? How exactly do they know, for example, “Women, ages 20-30 just love this show”? It just seems that every show that I’ve liked is subsequently cancelled.
I’m not a big TV watcher but for the odd show, almost as soon as I say “hey, this isn’t bad, I could watch this every week” it gets the ax.
Yes, I’ve heard of the “neilson boxes” that some viewers have attached to their TV. (Only in the United States if memory serves.) I own a satelite dish and, as such, only watch American feeds (the Canadian satelite choices suck).
Do any of you have one of these boxes?
And, what show have you really enjoyed got axed?
Neilsen takes a sample of around 1000 homes and determines U.S. viewing habits from that (that sounds like it’s not enough people sampled, but the mathematics is sound).
You used to fill out a diary. While you were a Neilsen family, you wrote down what you watched as you watched it (they still do this for their radio survey, which I once took part in). This led to a certain amount of cheating, so they switched over to boxes attached to the TV sets that record what’s on. You’re supposed to sign in when you’re watching, which is where they get the demographic information (though they also get this by knowing about your family).
The numbers are crunched and you get a rating (the number of households tuning in) and share (the percentage of people who have the TV on at that time and are watching your show). They try to break it down by age group by knowing who’s watching when, though this can be inaccurate if people forget to log in.
There is probably no 100% accurate way to determine this, but the Neilsens are the best we have.
As for your favorite show being cancelled, you have to remember that in order to succeed, a TV show has to reach a larger audience than any other medium. Even the biggest flop is seen by more people than all but the biggest hit movies. So it’s easy to be in the minority.
And, of course, as a member of the SDMB, you have better taste than average.
My mom is a ‘Neilson Family’, and they have her fill out a little diary. It asks how many people live in the house, and their sex and ages, and they send one for every TV in the house. You fill in who was watching what show, and for how long. She will usually fill it in the next day for what she watched the day before. Whenever I visit, I fill in that the whole family watched my favorite shows, even if it was only me.
Rose
I used to work for Ma Bell and one of my jobs was to install the Neilsens rating box. It was attached to the tv and tied into the phone line. You used a remote control to operate your tv and it periodically dumped your selections and on/off habits down the phone line. I don’t know about log books though. The systems I installed were automatic.
This was about 12 years ago, but I was a “ratings family” a couple of times. This is in Canada, and I can’t remember if it was the Neilsons, or if we do that rating here, but I did have to fill out a TV diary for every set in the house for a week. If I was missing one of my favourite shows because I was away (I was on a ski trip during one of my rating weeks), I lied and said I watched the shows anyway.
This past May, we were a Nielsen family. They sent us a diary for each working TV in the house. On each diary, I filled out demographic information on household members (name, age, sex). There was also information regarding the household’s income.
Each day had a new page in the diary. When the TV is on, you write down what program you are watching and who is watching it. There are even blank spaces to fill in visitors watching TV and (my favorite) “TV on and no one watching/listening.”
Programs recorded on the VCR are written down in the diary as if they were watched. The only exception is if you are recording one program while watching another (on the same TV/VCR setup). Then you write down the program you’re actually watching and write the VCR program on a seperate page for that purpose.
At the end of the week, we sent the diaries back. For this whole process (kind of a pain, really), we got paid $1.00. Hopefully, I’ll remember to declare it on my income tax.
On an unrelated matter, the A.C. Nielsen company also has us record our household purchases. They sent us a scanner that reads UPC’s on anything and everything. When we buy something, we scan the UPC and tell the machine where we got it and who purchased it. It even wants to know how we paid (cash, check, credit, debit, etc.). We even record when we used a coupon or were motivated by a store sale. In exchange for all this information, we are entered into periodic sweepstakes and we earn points to “buy” things from a catalog.
I think The Neilsons never contact us because we watch anything but ‘Network’ TV.
I do not recall ever seeing Neilson ratings for The Weather channel, which I’m sure is a big hit in tornado alley.
Interesting, I wonder why they still do this though.
With how high tech the converter boxes are for cable companies, you’d think they’d be able to create a special remote so each family member just hit their button when they were watching. Create an on-screen display that informs them whos logged in. Save the demographic dtat when they set it up. Have them update data once a month. All that in exchange for 50% off the cable, or maybe free service w/ all cable channels. Using this, and having it automated they could afford to do a much larger sample. They could get rid of the processing of the diaries. It would prevent cheating, and provide much faster ratings. why the archaic ratings…I presume DTV dishes can use the same technology as cable, and they could create one that plugs into the phone jack like a modem for the people with just Antenna access.
I agree it seems that shows that should be popular and good get cut awfully fast, not to mention really good shows get scheduled on bad nights like Friday and Saturday (Homicide and early X-files for example), or directly opposite MNF. I’d think that maybe the innacurate rating system is to blame.
Nope, a significant number of people do watch and love crap TV. Networks really only work for the lowest common denominator, at the price of quality. Good shows get relatively low ratings because the mass-audience thinks anything more complex than the A-team is too ‘intellectual’ for them.
Do they still base the Neilson numbers on a sample size of only 1000? I could see where this would be acceptable when there was only 3 networks and PBS. But as we approach the 500-channel reality, it would seem too many channels would fall below radar as it were.
For example, say of the 1000 Neilson families, no one tuned in Celebrity Soccer Challenge. Is a Neilson rating of 0 then accurate? When you are talking about 300,000,000 or so potential TV viewers, there could be a lot of potential unmeasured (and unmeasurable) activity. It is not inconceivable that this show could have had 500,000 viewers; but just not one of the 1000 wired to the Neilsons.
Maybe for setting advertisement rates, it is good enough that “less than 0.2% of people viewing” watched Charity Soccer Challenge. I guess all these types of shows can be put in the ‘also-ran, cheap ad rate’ category without anyone really caring what the actual numbers are.
