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You need to be actively recruited by Nielsen and have meters installed on your TV's to be a part of the sample of persons used to project ratings - either National or Local. Nielsen monitors the viewing habits of a relatively small portion of the nation's households and viewers. They statistically project those numbers out to the total population to report Viewership Ratings, Audience share and other levels of data used by the Broadcasting and Advertising community.

Your Cable provider does have ways of collecting and reporting on viewership (depending on the level of equipment you are using)but that data is not included in the Nielsen ratings you read. Some Cable providers use the data to negotiate rates for airtime but for viewership data to be included in Nielsen reportage, that data needs to adhere to some fairly strict guidelines. To project a National or Local sample "out" to a larger population, the sampled persons need to be in a relative proportion to the characteristics of the larger National or Local group. Cable companies don't do that - they can only report total viewers, Nielsen must be able to estimate viewers of specific demographic breaks such as age, education, Household Income....and believe it or not, dog and cat ownership.

If you are curious, I can answer questions on methodology and such

Speaking of Nielsen, they're now talking about going to 50,000 active meters (from the current 1,500) to monitor television viewing and have all the meters measure viewing at a level normally associated with November/February/May sweeps period monitoring the entire year. The reason is simple: monitoring hardware is now very cheap and thanks to wide availability of Internet access, the meters can report back to Neilsen far easier than in the past.

This monitoring change could dramatically alter how network programmers decide on what programs get and stay on the air, since it allows much more comprehensive breakdowns of viewer demographics than currently. Under this new system, a supposedly low-rated show like the recently cancelled Arrested Development will still be on the air, because with the much higher sampling rate Nielsen could note that there is a very loyal viewership for this show that is highly desired by advertisers. Also, with 50,000 active meters there will be no more overnight initial ratings since the ratings data will now come in faster.

It would be very interesting to see the demographic breakdown of The CBS Evening News under the new system--is CBS getting the right viewer demographic to justify paying Couric US$15 million per year?