The Nielsen company determines the ratings by choosing a random sample of people by going door-to-door, and installing monitors on their TVs. Then the viewers are meant to fill out surveys on their viewing habits, saying who was watching what and what their ages and gender was (that way the TV studios know if they're hitting their targets and how much they can charge for commercials appealling to that particular target market).
But a lot of people don't complete the surveys, so the data can be faulty. Because the sample they use is kind of small, a lot of people believe the system to be outdated, and were hoping that new data from Tivo and the like would outweigh it. But Nielsen then bought the rights to just incorporate Tivo data into their own calculations, so no dice. Anyway, the actual rating system for America is irritatingly complex; I know enough about the data to be able to say "lol yappari those numbers are horrible, my cult TV show of choice is utterly doomed" but I just know enough to be able to tell a good ratings number from a bad, and I get really confused at what the numbers literally mean.
Whereas Japan works off of really simple percentages: 9.3% of all people watching TV were watching this program. So I'm curious how they monitor it, though I don't know how I'd find out.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-03-25 04:34 am (UTC)But a lot of people don't complete the surveys, so the data can be faulty. Because the sample they use is kind of small, a lot of people believe the system to be outdated, and were hoping that new data from Tivo and the like would outweigh it. But Nielsen then bought the rights to just incorporate Tivo data into their own calculations, so no dice. Anyway, the actual rating system for America is irritatingly complex; I know enough about the data to be able to say "lol yappari those numbers are horrible, my cult TV show of choice is utterly doomed" but I just know enough to be able to tell a good ratings number from a bad, and I get really confused at what the numbers literally mean.
Whereas Japan works off of really simple percentages: 9.3% of all people watching TV were watching this program. So I'm curious how they monitor it, though I don't know how I'd find out.