This is probably no surprise to anyone who knows me, but I love TV. I plan my schedule according to when my favorite TV shows are on. I cry when characters die. And I’m always willing to stand up for TV.
That’s why I’m about to go on a raging written tirade against Nielsen Media Research, the lame-ass go-to authority on who’s watching what.
TV shows live and die by their ratings, or number of viewers, which is why I’m so pissed off that networks cancel shows simply because they don’t measure up in terms of Nielsen’s critically flawed rating system.
Nielsen gathers its ratings in a number of ways: through set meters, People Meters and diaries. Set meters are connected to selected families’ television sets and record only information about what channel they’re watching. People Meters go a little further to keep track of who’s watching TV by assigning each member of the household a button on a remote they are supposed to press whenever they’re watching. And diaries are little paper books used during the sweeps months to gather demographic information, which networks use for program scheduling and advertising decisions.
Does anyone see the potential problems here? Who has the time and patience to push an assigned button every time they sit down in front of the TV? It may sound like an easy task, but I know I would forget all the time, despite the flashing reminder light.
And, similar to the People Meters, the diaries are entirely subjective. Participants aren’t forced to fill out their diaries, and they’re not forced to tell the truth.
Beyond those obvious flaws, there’s a problem most people probably don’t know about: Nielsen’s ratings don’t take into account the viewing habits of college students, unless those students are already members of Nielsen families. This means that a lot of students who spend their time obsessing over their favorite shows have no control, since their viewing habits apparently don’t matter. College students are the core audience for shows like “Lost” and “Heroes,” so when statistics show that “Heroes” is down 2.6 million viewers since its debut, one has to wonder how accurate the numbers really are.
My real beef with Nielsen, however, is that its ratings fail to take into account the new ways people are watching TV. DVDs, DVRs, iTunes and the Internet are all an integral part of the TV-watching experience these days. Because of my busy schedule, I don’t have time to watch nearly as much TV as I used to, so I either wait for the DVDs of my shows to come out or watch the episodes I missed online. ABC.com has an awesome streaming video service for its shows, which is why it comes as no surprise to me that some of the network’s most popular shows have lost viewers (“Desperate Housewives” is down 5.3 million viewers since its season premiere). I want to see statistics on how many people are watching their shows online, because I have a feeling it’s higher than we think.
DVDs are even bigger than online video, though. Netflix, arguably the biggest online movie rental company with almost 6.8 million subscribers, said in a recent “Entertainment Weekly” article that about 20 percent of the DVDs it ships is TV shows. Factor in that Netflix subscribers can have anywhere from one to eight DVDs at a time, and you’ve got a hell of a lot of TV show DVDs.
In the case of DVRs, I’ve only seen statistics on the most-recorded shows once, and that was last summer. “Big Brother: All Stars” was by no means a big hit last summer if you ask Nielsen, but when “Entertainment Weekly” ran TiVo’s list of top shows, “Big Brother” sat right on top. People weren’t watching it live, but people were still watching it. And Nielsen’s ratings weren’t reflecting that. There is hope, because now Nielsen keeps track of people who watch recorded shows on the same day they aired. But if you’re not home to watch primetime TV, chances are you’re just going to wait until the next day or the weekend to get caught up. According to “EW,” when you factor in the number of people who watch “Lost” within a week, the show’s audience grows by 2 million people.
The problem of declining viewership is hardly as big of a problem as Nielsen would have you think. And it seems the company is finally stepping up “to provide the media industry with more holistic data.” Nielsen is now going to start tracking streaming video usage for broadcast and cable networks, and while this is a good step forward, only shows that are streamed online with the same content and commercials as they originally aired on TV will be taken into account in Nielsen’s ratings. Others (aka most online video) will be reported separately. Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of tracking streaming online video?
Oh, and did I mention that Nielsen’s meters don’t always work with new flat-screen TVs? Count the number of TV-watchers you know with flat-screen TVs and you’ll see how that could be problematic.
I think fans of the recently canceled cult shows “Veronica Mars” and “Jericho” share my frustration. These shows failed to draw the kinds of audiences studio executives wanted – at least according to Nielsen. Perhaps if the ratings system had been improved earlier, these shows would still be alive today. Poor Veronica. Who will fill her snarky shoes?
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Don’t pay attention to Nielsen
Daily Emerald
June 6, 2007
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