I’m not sure how this plan would help.
TV ratings are still, as always, determined by Neilsen (see wikipedia entry for how it works). Unless you’re a Neilsen household, there’s no mechanism by which your cable company or anyone else tracks or reports what you’re watching.
As of 2009, there were 114,500,000 U.S. television households. Of those, only 25,000 total American households (approx 0.02183% of the total) were Neilsen households.
Per JimRob, FreeRepublic had 273,808 unique viewers on election night, which is probably about our peak for the year. Of that number, it’s unlikely that even 1 or 2 of those viewers are connected to Neilsen’s metered ratings system.
A formal boycott of sponsors would probably be more affective if you were able to organize enough FReepers in a formal effort, though history tells me that’s a little like herding cats.
I appreciate that you’re trying to do something to make a difference, and hope you meet with some success.
If it goes viral and we include many other conservative websites to all boycott news sponsors starting with nbc,then it works.
Cable companies also certainly know who's watching what, even without a Nielsen report.....it's the digital age where everything is tracked.
Avoiding the ads on NBC News also reduces the amount of product we eventually buy. Very hard to quantify that part of it, but its safe to assume that exposing oneself to a product can only increase the likelihood of a purchase at some future time..
If letters to sponsors help, all the better.