Any good online sources for historical Nielsen ratings in the US? Preferably including any information on syndicated programs but at least for the networks?
::: bump :::
Anyone?
The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows by Brooks and Marsh has the top 10 shows on network TV for every year, but I can’t think of anything that covers cable and syndicated programming.
Before I post any sort of answer, two questions:
How far back do you want data from, and must it be accessible to the general public?
I would like data back as far as is possible but have no specific target date in mind. I don’t care whether it’s accessible to the general public as long as it’s accessible to me, prefereably for free but if there is a reasonable fee involved I might be willing to pay it.
Nielsen is very protective of it’s ratings, since it’s lists are copyrighted they won’t let you publish them and are pretty damn good about finding them
I can search my Newspaperarchive for Nielsen Ratings. I don’t know what I will find. Would that do you any good.
I don’t have any plans to publish lists. I work on Wikipedia articles about some old TV shows and I want to get ratings information for some of them, both where they ranked for individual episodes and where they stood overall for the season. I could find some of the information through newspaper archive searches myself, probably, but I was hoping there was an easy online source where I could plug in a show title and a year.