Posted on 09/23/2015 5:14:49 PM PDT by Graybeard58
A few years ago I had the chance to be a Nielsen “family” (though I live alone) and catalog, for all posterity, a detailed record of my TV viewing habits. Eventually—I assumed— this raw data would be processed and reported to the masses, with my viewing choices powerfully impacting the national viewing audience. Tough work, but someone’s got to do it.
Though you can apply to the Nielsen company to be “sampled”, I did not. A letter just arrived out of the blue one day in my mailbox. It asked me if I would participate in their TV watching/ratings survey for a one-week period. I said yes—why not?—and returned the enclosed, pre-paid postcard. I guess this is the anachronistic norm for Nielsen: just recruit through the mail, keep it as low-tech as possible.
So, sadly, after I signed up, I did not get a fancy PeopleMeter to sit upon my TV and record my viewing selections automatically. Instead, I got an old-fashioned—but I presume still reliable—“diary”, a sort of old Bluebook-looking booklet with pre-lined pages held together with staples. Again, quaint. This is how I was to record my watching for the next seven days. Along with a page for each day of the week, there were also a few blank pages at the back to list the programs I “time-shifted”, i.e., taped or DVR-ed for watching later.
Though Nielsen never promised me money or anything else in exchange for my participation, the day I got my diary, I found enclosed in the envelope five incredibly crisp $1 bills. This, I assumed, was considered incentive enough by the company to get me and everyone else to follow through on what we promised.
Being a Nielsen family shouldn’t come with too much pressure—I mean, it’s just TV—but it does, nonetheless. Suddenly you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders; you are much more self-aware of what you watch. TV used as background, TV viewed mindlessly, is no longer an option. You have to be involved, aware enough now to at least somewhat remember what you are “watching”.
As a Nielsen family, you can also easily become drunk with power. I wondered how many shows and livelihoods rested on my answers, my every viewing minute. Being familiar enough with the Nielsen ratings system (I majored in radio and TV in college,) I knew how important these ratings meant to the TV industry. No, this is not a responsibility to take lightly! And, frankly, when Lipstick Jungle was cancelled, I blamed myself.
The hardest part of keeping the diary was not remembering what I watched or what I remembered watching, but determining just how honest I was going to be. Did I really want to reveal that much of myself even to these Nielsen strangers? Was I really going to admit to watching the six-hour Dog the Bounty Hunter marathon on A&E last Saturday? Was I going to disclose the fact that every night before going to bed I watched Crossing Over with John Edward on the Sci-Fi Network? Do I admit that sometimes, yes, I do get sucked into infomercials? (Remember Nads, that gooey and poorly named Australian hair removal product that came in a jar? Wasn’t that, like, oddly and hypnotically compelling?!)
Feeling brave, I ultimately decided I just had to be 100 percent candid. I swallowed my pride and tried not to think about what my TV habits said about me, I just did it, reputation be damned.
Actually, the sense of duty and the pressure to be accurate and true is not completely misplaced considering Nielsen’s odd methodology and skimpy sample size. In the end, every rating point and every answered survey does matter in the millions—of dollars, if not actual viewers.
The Nielsen Company, headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, Illinois likes to keeps its sampling stats secret. (My inquiries to the company for this article went unanswered.) And, as a privately held company, that is certainly their right. They are no more obligated to share their methodology than KFC has to reveal its secret mixture 11 herbs and spices. Still, enough journalistically sound investigations have been done to arrive at an estimate that the number of people sampled for the weekly TV ratings to be around 37,000.
But this number then begs a question: how can TV ratings by Nielsen be reported every week in terms of millions of viewers if less than 40,000 people are actually being counted? Well, in some ways, we’ve all been lied to.
To achieve its numbers—which eventually get accepted as the gospel by the broadcast and cable networks—Nielsen relies on a mathematically accepted system called “statistical sampling”. It extrapolates—some could say exaggerates—its core findings. It assumes—as do almost all surveys in every field—that for every person watching a show, that person represents “X” number of others. Nielsen takes its original numbers, does the math and then reports the final, calculated sum. In many ways, what Nielsen reports in the ends is, basically, a mathematical theory, an estimate, an educated guess.
The across-the-board adopting of Nielsen’s numbers is interesting considering the stunning paucity of its sample size. While 37,000 is a lot of people, especially if you had to sit and count and process their viewing habits every day of the week, it’s still a group of people smaller than the population of, say, Peoria, Illinois, or Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In fact, it’s smaller than the entire population of American Samoa. In fact, it’s smaller than the number of people than can be fit into Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee, or the number that can be seated at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas. And it is only 10,000 more than can be seated inside Madison Square Garden.
What this means, then, is that a group of people, smaller in number than the town I grew up in (Galesburg, Illinois), in fact, smaller than most towns most people grew up in, ultimately decides what is watched by a nation of 313 million. Behold the power of (sort of) math!
Considering the “supermajority” status that every Nielsen “family” carries with it for the duration of the time they are surveyed , I do have to wonder what profound impact I had on the worlds of television during my tenure. Of course, both Dog the Bounty Hunter and Crossing Over are gone now, so maybe that tells me something. But at least I can say that I’m not the one that killed them.
Of course, the critically acclaimed Arrested Development (a show I could never cotton to) is gone now and 30 Rock never made it to the top ten. And, for that, I guess I would like to sincerely apologize now.
Media delivery is far too diverse for these ratings to mean much of anything. Just my opinion.
If Nielsen is gathering data from 37,000 people, and the sample is representative of the population as a whole, then they should be correct within 0.5%.
Some people have too much time on their hands.
Many years ago (30+?) I was a Nielsen “family”. That was when all I watched was network news. (Yeah, I know ...) So I wrote down all the news shows that I watched, and then in the back in the “comments” section, I let them have it about what I thought about network TV. Never heard back, and was never asked again to contribute.
We have OTA, so often we race up and down until we give up and read a book or watch something on Netflix. If we had cable then it might take 10 minutes to run the channels to find something that wasn't totally stupid.
I took part in the Nielsen survey for a while, years ago.
It worked exactly as this article described: You’re sent some crisp bills up front, in return for keeping track of everything you watch. You must write everything down on a type of chart. At the time, I was a notorious channel surfer, but, because I was so detailed, Nielsen invited me to do more surveys. I think they sent me $10 at one point.
The death of Arrested Development was sad. Though it was too clever for most Americans judging by the type of comedies that stay on top.
But Cary, if you were part of the cause of death of Firefly, we might have to have a serious discussion.
See my post #8 above. After reading your post, now I know I was ripped off!
Wow! I think I only got paid $1. Life is so unfair.
After the second or third call I got from a radio ratings service, I agreed to keep a diary for them. The funny thing is that I told them up front that I don’t listen to the radio. They said surveys needed to include nonusers, too. So I got a few bucks and a blue book in the mail.
I was supposed to write down on every page that I didn’t listen to the radio that day if such was the case. Eventually, I tossed the book in the trash. Never heard from them again.
“Goomba, gooomba, gooomba, goomba....”
We were a Neilson family about ten years ago based on the participation of my then thirty-something aged daughter - it was about the time Joe Scarborough had just started his show on MSNBC, so we made sure we listed it as what we watched whenever possible, figuring we’d help get a Republican, “conservative” get a toehold at that leftwing bastion - not sure how much it did to help, but his show goes on, although I never watch it and from what I hear he is a very unreliable spokesman for the conservative cause - be careful what you wish for.....
I was a Nielson family for a week about 20 years ago, but I don’t remember receiving any money with the request. I happened to mention to a friend that I was doing the Nielson survey, and she asked if I would watch a show for her. I’m not much of a TV watcher, so I would usually turn on the TV and mark that it was on, but that I wasn’t watching. I recorded some shows, and wrote that down in the book, too. I do recall that I watched more TV than normal that week, because for that one week, my TV watching “counted.”
There were a couple of times in the past when I got a phone call asking me to turn on a normally unused cable channel and watch a show. The day after, someone from that company would call and ask a lot of questions about the show and the commercials that ran during the show. The first time it happened, my answers were somewhat vague and I did not remember any of the commercials. The second time it happened, I knew what kinds of questions to expect, and so I paid attention to the commercials. I remember talking about one particular commercial being very dark—it was for an Olive Garden type restaurant, featuring a family sitting around a table, apparently having a good time and enjoying good food—in the dark. That company asked me a LOT of questions about that dark commercial. I don’t know what that company was, or whether it was gathering information about the pilot shows (neither of which ever made it past the pilot) or the commercials.
We were selected as a Nielsen “family” over 15 years ago, long before Netflix, DVRs or even DVDs. We did have a VCR, but didn’t watch it that week.
We had basically the same experience as the author of the article. We were invited to participate by mail and when we accepted we were sent a paper diary to record all of our viewing choices for the week.
It wasn’t hard to keep track, since we watched a total of about 2 hours of TV that week, which was typical of most weeks back then. Our kids were in elementary school and we kept the TV off most of the time.
We were never invited back.
No discussion!
A lynching would be in order!
Check out the surreptitious audio encoded signals Neilson uses for detailed viewing tracking:
I was an early ‘Nielsen Netratings’ person. I participated for years, until I had a ‘milestone’ birthday and they decided I was too old. I figured I really pushed up FR ratings. It was nice. They basically ran my browsing through a proxy server, which provided an extra layer of protection from embedded garbage. They mailed me a savings bond every quarter. (From the article and comments, it was less work and more money than the TV.)
TCM 24/7.
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