(upbeat music)
- We've all heard about TV ratings,
they're just an estimate
of how many people
are watching a particular
show at a given time
and they're a big deal,
but what are these ratings anyway?
Where do they come from and
why are they so important?
In the United States and Canada,
TV ratings are synonymous
with one company, Nielsen,
which was founded in 1923 by an engineer
named Arthur Nielsen.
The company uses a technique
called statistical sampling
to rate the shows.
This is the same techniques
that polsters use
to predict the outcome of elections.
To find out who's watching what,
the company gets thousands of households
to become part of the
representative sample
for the national ratings estimates.
These participants are randomly selected
and they're paid a little bit,
but not near enough to quit their day jobs
and just watch TV full time.
To find out what these
people are watching,
the company installs a black
box on the TVs in a home.
Now, this isn't the same
as a black box on a plane,
it's just a computer and a modem.
The box keeps track of when the TV is on
and what it's tuned to.
Ever night, the box gathers up
the household's viewing data
and sends all this information
to the company's central computer.
So, what do the ratings actually mean?
The numbers we see in published ratings
typically represent a
share of total viewers.
So, for example, a 1.0
Nielsen rating indicates
that 1% of the 115.9 million
estimated TV watching households
tuned into a program.
The data is also broken off
into different demographic ratings,
the most important
being people ages 18-34.
Make no mistake, this research
is worth billions of dollars.
Advertising rates are
based on Nielsen's data.
That's why a 30-second
commercial on one show
might cost twice as much as a commercial
on a low-rated show.
Programmers also use
Nielsen's data to decide
which shows to keep and which to cancel.
And there's an elephant in the room here.
The way people watch TV
is changing with DVR,
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime,
other streaming services.
TV viewers are more likely to customize
their viewing habits,
watching stuff when they want to see it,
rather than when it happens to be on.
As viewing habits continue to fragment
across different platforms,
advertisers, content creators,
and audience members
alike are right to ask,
how accurate are these ratings?
So, what's the best way for us to measure
what people watch?
If you could bring back
one show on the air,
what would it be?
Let me know in the comments below,
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