What is involved in being a Neilson Family?
I can remember back in the early 80’s, my family received a “polling booklet” for Nielson ratings, which we were free to fill out and send in, or ignore. I would think that nowadays, what with the computer revolution and all, there would be more high tech polling solutions.
And while we’re at it, who the hell is Neilson anyway?
I can’t tell you who the Nielsen’s are.
From what I can tell there are two systems the Nielsen people use. One is the booklets to houses, the other is to set up equipment in houses that gauges what the people watch on each television.
My parents were a Nielsen family a few years ago. It last 3 or 4 years, I forget which. Anyway, they set up a modem in the basement, and hooked up each Television in the house with a device that tracked which channel was being watched. Every night the results were sent from the modem. (It used to bug me when I was visiting and on the computer, because the modem would knock me offline when it picked up and attempted to dial. “Gah, now I have to redownload the goat porn!”)
When I was in gradeschool I was sent a Nielsen booklet, I filled it out religously an they rewarded me with a crisp one dollar bill.
Here is a couple of links about the subject.
How do the Neilson Ratings work?
Neilsen Ratings…How do they work?
We’re going to be a nielsen home
pat
What a coincidence. Demo and i are gonna be doing this the week of Nov. 23rd. From what I understand they are gonna send us a “diary” to fill in and send back. Since we don’t watch much TV it should be fairly easy. I’ll give you details when the book arrives, perhaps in a day or two.
Whoops, I thought you said we weren’t going to do it, so i threw something away that came from them. A large something. Oh well, I guess BattleBots and Jeapody aren’t going to get any extra votes from this house…
My parents were a Nielson family for a while. They had the box.
It was an ugly device with a row of red LEDs. The inhabitants of the house are assigned a number. There is a special remote for the machine, when you are watching TV you push the numbers for the people who are watching, and their lights will come on on the box. If a guest is in the same room as the television, you are supposed to assign them a temporary light, and you have to punch in their age and gender.
It was incredibly annoying. Periodically all the lights on the box start flashing, and if you are still watching TV you are supposed to push the ‘OK’ button to let it know that you are still watching. The lights will also start flashing if someone enters or leaves the room, you are supposed to update the machine on who is now watching.
My parents are old (my Dad is 70, my Mom 65) and frequently fell asleep in front of the TV. Usually it would start flashing (meaning whatever was on wasn’t counted as something that was being watched) but sometimes it wouldn’t - I would come in late at night and the TV would be on some god-awful late-night programming my parents would never watch in a million years with my Mom asleep on the sofa. I’m sure it really skewed their stats. They also probably believed that 65 year old women spend hours watching the local cable time and temperature channel, when in fact my Mom was on channel 3 because she was playing Tetrisphere on my N64.
My parents got paid for it, I think it was something like $20 a month, but eventually they got sick of babysitting the box and got rid of it.
We were a Nielsen family about a year ago. They sent a diary for each television we were then using. You wrote down in the book the name of the program you were watching and what channel you were watching it on. You also indicated who was watching. My favorite indication was the one for “TV on and no one watching.” I always felt like a moron when that was indicated.
At the front of the booklet, you filled out demographic information about the members of your household. There was also space to list the channels available to that TV (ie cable, over-the-air, dss).
The whole thing was a pain in the neck. It was often difficult to remember what all needed to be written down. It was also complicated to record programs watched vs. programs recorded on the VCR.
In an unrelated note, we are currently an A.C. Nielsen HomeScan family. They sent us a laser barcode scanner which we use to scan all of our family’s purchases. We tell them what we got (via the UPC), where we got it, how much it cost, and how we paid (cash, check, credit card, debit card). The reward for all of this is bonus points we can cash in for rewards later. So far, after three years, we’re up to 55,000 points. Hooray for us!
I started the Neilson thing once, but had to stop.
It was just impossible to get meaningful numbers.
People come in and out of the room and the channel was changed more times than their log allowed. It’s all lies, based on my experience. People must be “voting” rather than being surveyed.
First of all let me say that I searched for this topic but I forgot to change the date range for the search, that’s why I couldn’t find the old threads. Oops.
But what I’ve not been able to figure out is how they get the over night ratings. I rememnber the booklet thing, but that only gets sent in like a week after the fact. Do they only base the overnight ratings on the few who have those boxes? Do they do poll calls to figure this stuff out?
You see my wife has this thing about tuning into to crappy shows. She always says, “you know we’re feeding the ratings for this pile o’ crap”, even though we have no Nielson hardware. So we are thoroughly convinced that TV manufacturers are in cahoots with the Nielson people. Big Brother is watching, but only for Nielson rating purposes.