They wanted me to keep a TV viewing diary this Thursday. With work, etc., I don’t watch much TV on Thursdays, but they offered ten dollars for the effort, so I’ll do it.
My plan is this: Because so many lousy shows get such high ratings, I think I’ll just deliberately tune into as many of them as I can find, and then change the channel in “disgust” each time, fervently recording said disgust into the diary, along with a diatribe about how I’ll never watch that show again.
Do you think this is ethical? It’s kind of like a negative survey–not what I like but what I don’t like. Maybe it will have more effect. Or will they figure it out, and ignore me?
Not ethical at all.
I watch a lot of television and have to agree that many of the popular shows are indeed crap. But if I were part of the Nielsen ratings family, I would play fair and state that I didn’t watch that particular show and put down what, if anything, I did watch.
Although I would dearly love to see most of the reality shows dropped, there seems to be lots of people who like them - and who am I to begrudge their choice?
I don’t think it’s ethical, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
We were a Nielsen family for a while. We did not keep a diary - we had boxes hooked up to our TVs, which recorded our viewing habits (including DVR viewing, which is how we view most programs - a fact which we told them up front).
We were supposed to have signed up for 18 months, but they dropped us after 9 months. I asked why, and they were cagey about it on the phone. The technician who removed the equipment told us that we probably time-shifted to much for Nielsen to feel comfortable about us representing several thousand households - he said most of the premature uninstallations he did usually involved DVRs.
Now, we did watch a lot of programs live, but they were pretty much all basic cable series, mostly Sci-Fi Channel stuff, where Nielsen ratings are less important.
So even if you did what you are thinking, Nielsen would likely ignore your feedback and drop you. They’re not interested in tracking the actual habits of real-world viewers - they want data that will continue to support their idea of how people watch TV. Which is - people sit down, to watch a 30-60 minutes of utter crap, without fast forwarding, or muting, or attempting to avoid commercials in any way shape or form. Good little sheep that consume what they’re spoon-fed - you know, the kind of people who watch “Two and a Half Men”, and bad reality programming.
Stuff like that is the reason why they do thousands of such surveys; they assume they’ll get a few people trying to actively try to do something strange, and the overall numbers of people who do accurately and legitimately report their viewing far outnumber the few nutjobs. So, even if you feel the need to lodge your “protest” in this way, it won’t make a significant dent in the numbers – and, it’s entirely possible that they will toss your diary out.
I won’t address the ethics of it, but it’s counter-productive as to what you want to do. The Nielsen’s care less about what you think of a show and more about whether your eyeballs were looking at it when the commercials came on. You will be claiming that you actually saw those commercials.
TV ratings aren’t like other polls. You will never hear “Little People, Big Dogs has a 47 % approval rating”, but you will hear “1.2 million people watched Dancing with Ice Road Truckers last night”. They don’t care much what you think of the show. It’s did you watch? And you’ll be saying yes.
So don’t even think about implementing your plan, less truly bad TV conquer the dial because of inflated ratings numbers. And if Jeff Dunham gets a reality show where contestants bake theme cakes because of your little plan, I will find you. I will hunt you down, guizot, I will hunt you down
I have to say I find it strangely quaint that Neilsen is still using viewing diaries as guizot describes. It seems to me that the number of people who just write down their favorite shows - whether they actaully watched that night or not - is probably not insignificant.
This, coupled with Crown prince of Irony’s anecdote, lead me to wonder if ratings have anything whatsoever to do with reality.
I don’t get the ethics problem. If it’s a show you wouldn’t watch anyways, saying you’d never watch them again would not be lying.
Ans where were you guys when people talk about deliberately watching shows they never really watch, but want to do well? Everyone seemed to think that, as long as they watched them with the box, they weren’t lying.
Heck, it’s not like these guys want an impartial survey in the first place, or they wouldn’t pull it from people that aren’t watching the shows the way they want. Heck, according to this thread, watching mostly stuff on cable will get the box pulled.
It’s almost a shame… I’m broke and I watch lots of TV now that I’m unemployed (not so much watching as having it on in the background while I sew curtains or fill out job applications or whatever). I could stand to make $10. Or have a box and get paid for that… I wish.
The diaries are a secondary data source for Nielsen now.
Their primary data source are electronic meters, which recors which show the TV is tuned to. There are, IIRC, several thousand households across the US with meters; the demographics of those households are carefully chosen so that the “sample” of those households can be projected up to the total U.S. population.
In addition, four times a year (“sweeps months”), Nielsen supplements the meters with paper diaries which go to a much larger number of households. This supplemental data lets Nielsen generate more detailed information on ratings in individual markets – there are only enough meters in any particular market for Nielsen to be able to reliably report ratings for the largest few markets; with the addition of the diaries, they can reliably report ratings for smaller markets, as well.
Well, presumably it all comes down to advertising, and I’m trying really hard to recall a purchase I’ve made–or any decision as a consumer I’ve taken–as a result of something I’ve seen on TV. Even while watching a show I like. There’s just no connection for me. In fact, the more I like the show, the more annoying the ad, the more negative the association I have with the product.
Anyway, it’s not just for a day. I’ve looked over the logs, and it goes for a week. So far today, nothing for me.
Personally, I think the TV universe would improve immensely if the Nielsen ratings got a lot more responses like “I watched the last 10 minutes of [show that I like], surfed around for 5 minutes and turned the box off because there wasn’t anything on that was worth my time.”
In other words, if you truly wouldn’t watch what’s on Thursday nights, what’s wrong with telling them you’d rather read a book?
My parents got the diaries at their house maybe ten or twenty years ago, and they were really annoying. You were supposed to write down everything you watched (I think in thirty minute increments) and they included a dollar for each diary as compensation. It was way more trouble than it’s worth. (They also received the diaries to record their radio listening a couple of times, and that was a total waste on the part of the ratings agencies, as the only radio they listen to is in the car, and it’s tuned to the CBS new radio station pretty much permanently.
I don’t watch TV at all because I can’t afford cable and you can’t pick up a signal in this area without cable (don’t ask).
I do watch The Daily Show on their website, though. And I finally joined the Firefly 'verse through Hulu a few months back. Both of those show commercials. Do those get counted anywhere?
Not in the Nielsen ratings, no. Those websites undoubtedly collect information on how many people view those episodes (and their commercials), but, at least for the moment, Nielsen only collects information on actual TV viewing.
As watching shows online becomes more common, I’d imagine that Nielsen will eventually start collecting ratings data on them. (They’re still wrestling over how best to account for people who time-shift shows using their DVRs, since many people fast-forward through the commercials on those.)
Remember Nielsen is NOT a scientific survey. Now in Nielsen’s defense they have not now nor ever claimed to be scientific. What Nielsen does is measure viewing patterns for their clients.
Who are their clients? TV stations.
So TV stations say to themselves, who has the most income to spend. Then they decide and sign on to Nielsen’s service. A TV station doesn’t have to subscribe to Nielsen but almost all do 'cause it’s nearly impossible to sell ad time unless you have numbers.
So Nielsen gets the type of people TV stations want to appeal to and puts them in their surveys.
This is why Blacks and Latinos especially have been calling Nielsen unfair. And it is, but again, Nielsen never claims to be FAIR. They never claim to be a poll of what ALL Americans watch. It is polling a subset of people that adverstisers want to appeal to.
This is why people get dropped. You can fool Nielsen but not for long. This is why if you are a Nielsen Family and you aren’t watching much TV or watching only PBS, you will get dropped quicker. Why should Nielsen take up a slot in their survey for people who don’t watch ads on TV?
The whole idea is to have people that DO watch so they can sell those stats to TV stations and make money
You mean they think that Blacks and Latinos stuff all their money in mattresses and never spend it?
Every time Nielsen contacted me in the process towards getting the diaries they made sure to ask what languages were spoken in the house. The diaries themselves are bi-lingual, and the Spanish type is larger than the English. Seeing as most Spanish speakers in L.A. are Latinos, I’m pretty sure that they do indeed want to know what Latinos are watching, because the Spanish-language media is huge here. The radio station with the largest audience in Los Angeles is Spanish-language programing, and over 35% of households have at least one Spanish speaker. The Spanish-language TV stations are big ad bucks, too.
They sent an initial cold-call form letter with general questions (how many TVs, what languages in the house, do you have a DVR?, etc.), and when I responded by mailing it back, they called me to do a phone interview (same questions), perhaps in order to determine that the household qualified for diaries.
It could be that because our household is bilingual (actually trilingual, but there’s no Danish programing in L.A., as far as I know) they wanted us to do the diary.
