Okay, I’ve asked around and no one can answer this logicly. How does the cable company measure ratings? The only two explanations I’ve been able to come up with is (a)they monitor what channel you’re watching, or (b) they call and take polls. I realize the first can’t be right because the cable transmits all the channels to the TV at once, and it’s one wayed. I don’t think the second is right either because I’ve never been called, and neither has anyone else I know. Am I missing something obvious, or are they just guessing?
The top independent research firm specializing in television viewing habits is Nielsen Media.
The gist of it is, if you’re randomly chosen to be a “Nielsen Household”, you are either given a “diary” to record every television show you watch over a given period of time, or a small box to attach to your television that records your viewing electronically.
Check out their website to see how it works.
Jeg elsker dig, Thomas
Let’s use Sci-Fi network as an example.
Cable networks have a habit of showing their ratings as a percentage of their coverage area. In Sci-fi’s case that is about 68.3 million households this month, but it changes every month as they grow, so as you look backward it is a smaller number. Because it grows every month, that means a 1.5 rating from last year is a different number of households than a 1.5 rating this year.
But, when the SciFiwire shows the ratings for broadcast networks and syndication, they show those as a percentage of the whole country, which is 102 million households.
They don’t properly explain in their footnote that they are doing this, but I’ve seen the ratings from other sources and that is what they do. If you worked at an ad agency, they must put all the networks, including cable, on the same scale, the national one. When you have an ad buy consisting of multiple networks, you can’t be forced to remember what the relative coverage is of each of them to say how many rating points you bought. All the rating points have to be based on 102.2 million households.
If the SciFiwire showed their ratings on the national scale instead of their “coverage area” scale, you’d actually see more growth in viewing that you see now because in the last two years, Sci-Fi has picked up at least 10 million households in its coverage area. But the numbers would be smaller.
Today, a 1.0 Sci-Fi coverage area rating would be shown as a 0.7 national rating. It’s a .67 adjustment because they are in about two thirds of the country now.
For example, when Farscape(Sci-Fi’s biggest show) debuted it got a 1.3 coverage area rating that translated to a 0.7 national rating. Today, if it got a 1.3 coverage area rating, it translates to a 0.9 national rating because of growth in how many people can even get the SciFi Channel.
Many cable networks re-air their shows three hours later(Farscape, Larry King Live, Biography), though. This second showing does not usually get represented accurately.