Nielsen: Counting The Few

"Q: It seems as if every TV show we enjoy and look forward to goes off the air due to low ratings. Could you explain how ratings are obtained? We have never been contacted by phone or any other medium as to what we are watching and are longtime viewers.

A: Ratings are based on the viewing habits of a sample of the audience. For the more than 111 million TV homes in the United States, Nielsen uses about 25,000 homes with meters to determine day-to-day ratings and about 1.6 million homes filling in diaries during ratings ''sweeps,'' the major measurement periods for local TV stations. Nielsen tries to select homes that, as a group, represent the entire population in terms of age and other factors, but there have been many criticisms over the years of the validity of that sample."



Most recorded based on TiVo numbers:
# 14- Jericho

Moved up 10 spots. See here.



Another Big Nielsen Error here.




Speaking of validity I found this at CBS:

"I have read in other posts that not all the CBS affiliates aired the repeat showing on Saturday."

Yes, this happened back during the summer too.

Jericho and TiVo

If you have TiVo you can record Jericho (on CBS and SciFi) and play it back the next day with commercials.
It's a lot easier to find TiVo owners than it is Nielsen families.


"The TiVo data is derived from a daily, anonymous, stratified random sample of 20,000 TiVo units from which the second-by-second "clickstream" of behavior and viewership is collected and assessed."


"As with TiVo's normal Stop||Watch data, the user information should remain anonymous and will be randomly plucked from TiVo's usual subscriber base. The change is expected to help CBS adapt both the way it displays advertising as well as the shows themselves; data collected in the near future should allow for ads that are more likely to garner attention as well as find a way to promote other shows to customers who might never see traditional spots, the studio says.

CBS is only the second major TV producer after NBC Universal to use the TiVo service to gauge ratings and reveals an increasing shift away from traditional ratings firms such as Nielsen, which often focus solely on live TV broadcasts."


"Nielsen's newer methods rely on automatic collection, too, and they should be just as accurate, but they require additional hardware installation and will always rely on a smaller statistical sample than TiVo's entire customer base. (Just last month, Nielsen said it would increase its sample size to 37,000 households by 2011.) For TiVo, that's some 2.5 million data points from the grandfathered DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) TiVo users alone, plus 1.7 million direct TiVo customers."

For more info on how TiVo works go here.


Many thanks to Gwen and The Jericho Telegraph for much of this information.