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Nielsen Ratings
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Nielsen Ratings are audience measurement systems developed by the AC Nielsen Company, (now Nielsen Media Research) to determine the audience size and composition of television programming. Founder Arthur Nielsen was a market analysis specialist whose career had begun in the '20s with brand advertising analysis and expanded into radio market analysis during the '30s, culminating in Nielsen ratings of radio programming, meant to provide detailed and accurate statistics as to markets of radio shows.
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Nielsen Ratings are audience measurement systems developed by the AC Nielsen Company, (now Nielsen Media Research) to determine the audience size and composition of television programming. Founder Arthur Nielsen was a market analysis specialist whose career had begun in the '20s with brand advertising analysis and expanded into radio market analysis during the '30s, culminating in Nielsen ratings of radio programming, meant to provide detailed and accurate statistics as to markets of radio shows. In 1950, Nielsen moved to television, developing an offshoot ratings system using the methods he and his company had developed for radio. It has since been the primary source of audience measurement information in the television industry around the world. Recognizing that television as a business made its money by selling audiences to advertisers, the Nielsen company developed sophisticated statistical methodologies to help programmers and advertisers clearly target audiences and markets. Nielsen Television Ratings are currently the single most important element in determining advertising rates, schedules, and program content.
Measuring ratings
Nielsen Television Ratings are gathered in one of two ways, both of them adaptations of the company's earliest methods. One involves the use of viewer "diaries," in which a target audience self-records its viewing (or listening) habits. By targeting various demographics, the assembled statistical models promise an accurate rendering of the audiences of any given show, network, programming hour, and the like. A more technologically sophisticated system has used Set Meters, which are small devices connected to every television in selected homes. These devices gather the viewing habits of the home and transmit the information nightly to Nielsen through a "Home Unit" connected to a phone line. Set Meter information is meant to eliminate subject biases and survey-response effects; scholarly literature has suggested that diarists change their habits to conform to their desired profile. The technology-based "home unit" system is meant to allow market researchers to more accurately study television viewing habits on a minute to minute basis, seeing the exact moment viewers change channels or turn off their TV. In addition to this technology, the implementation of individual viewer reporting devices (called people meters) has allowed the company to separate household viewing information into various demographic groups. While this system removes one form of bias, it cannot account for the presence of actual viewers in front of sets, i.e. the "empty-room syndrome" in which tvs play without active viewers.
Changing systems of viewing, however, have been an active cause for Nielsen's changing methods of market research. In 2005, Nielsen began measuring the usage of digital video recordings (TiVo, for example) and initial results indicate that time-shifted viewing will have a significant impact on television ratings. The networks are not yet figuring these new results into their ad rates at the resistance of advertisers.
Ratings/share and total viewers
The most commonly cited Nielsen results are reported in two measurements: ratings points and share, usually reported as (ratings points/share). As of September 1, 2008, there are an estimated 114.5 million television households in the United States. A single national ratings point represents one percent of the total number, or 1,145,000 households for the 2006-07 season.
Share is the percentage of television sets in use tuned to the program. For example, Nielsen may report a show as receiving a 9.2/15 during its broadcast, meaning that on average 9.2 percent of households were tuned in at any given moment. Additionally, 15 percent of all televisions in use at the time were tuned into this program (i.e. how many of those televisions were watching this particular show). Nielsen re-estimates the number of households each August for the upcoming television season. The difference between rating and share is that a rating reflects the percentage of the total population of televisions tuned to a particular program while share reflects the percentage of televisions actually in use tuned to a particular program.
Nielsen Media Research also provides statistics on estimated total number of individual viewers, and on specific demographics. Advertising rates are influenced not only by the total number of viewers, but also by particular demographics, such as age, gender, economic class, and area. Younger viewers are considered more attractive for many products, whereas in some cases older and wealthier audiences are desired, or female audiences are desired over males.
Because ratings are based on samples, it is possible for shows to get 0.0 share, despite having an audience; the CNBC talk show McEnroe was one notable example. Another example is The CW Television Network show, CW Now, which received two 0.0 ratings in the same season.
The term is also used by Arbitron for describing the percentage listening to a particular radio station out of all those listening to radio in the market area.
Demos
| Demographic | Million |
|---|
| Adults 18+ | 206 | | Men 18+ | 100 | | Women 18+ | 107 | | 65+ | 34 | | 12-34 | 90 | | 18-34 | 66 | | 18-49 | 130 | | 25-54 | 121 | | 45-64 | 69 |
Commercial ratings
Nielsen provides viewership data calculated as the average viewership for only the commercial time within the program. This “Commercial Ratings” first became available on May 31, 2007. Additionally, Nielsen provides different “streams” of this data in order to take into consideration delayed viewing (DVR) data, at any interval up to seven days.
C3 was the metric launched in 2007. C3 refers to the ratings for average commercial minutes in live programming plus three days of digital video recorder playback.
Sweeps
Much of the ratings system, however, still consists of the completion by viewers of ratings diaries, in which a viewer records his or her viewing habits, generally for a week, in exchange for being advanced a nominal amount (up to $30 in the United States). These diaries play an especially important role during the four sweeps periods conducted in February, May, July and November in an attempt to measure smaller local market audiences in markets that are not covered by People Meter samples already. (Other, smaller sweeps are conducted through the year in the markets large enough to be measured by non-demographic meters, but not large enough to be measured by the demographic meters (people meters).
The term "sweeps" has two meanings. One refers to how the diaries were handled by Nielsen Media when the ratings were first produced: They are mailed to the households and processed by starting on the East Coast and "sweeping" across the nation. The other refers to television programming during the months of November, February, May and (of lesser importance) July, in which eagerly anticipated programs are deliberately scheduled in order to boost television ratings.
Television networks and other programmers make unusual efforts to attract additional viewers during these periods, including broadcasting mostly original programming as opposed to repeats, showing more special broadcasts, and including special content in programming such as guest stars, controversial and unexpected plots or topics, extended episodes, finales, and increased competition in advertising. Even news programs are often involved, broadcasting especially controversial or titillating investigative reports and promotions. For this reason, the "sweeps" system of national ratings has been criticized as not representative of typical programming, and encouraging an increase in content of concern such as violence and explicit sexuality. Outside of these peak periods it is more common to see reruns of television programs.
Nielsen 2008 sweeps dates | February 2008 | 31 January – 27 February, 2008 | | May 2008 | 24 April – 21 May, 2008 | | July 2008 | 3 July – 30 July, 2008 | | November 2008 | 30 October – 26 November, 2008 |
Nielsen 2009 sweeps dates | March 2009 | March 5 - April 1, 2009 | | May 2009 | April 23 - May 20, 2009 | | July 2009 | July 2 - July 29, 2009 | | November 2009 | October 29 - November 25, 2009 |
Note: The February 2009 sweeps period was moved to March so that the ratings would not be affected by any problems created by the February 17th switchover of the USA's analog broadcast television signals to digital. When, in early February, the digital transition date was moved to June 12, the "February" sweeps period for 2009 remained in March.
The change in the 2009 February sweeps schedule also provided a clearer picture of ratings, because the new period did not include this years Super Bowl (in sweeps since 2004) or the Daytona 500 (in sweeps since 2007, when the finish aired in primetime), both of which events often inflate ratings during sweeps periods. It does, however, cover the first four rounds of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament for the first time.
Criticism of ratings systems
There is some public critique regarding accuracy and potential bias within Nielsen's rating system. In June 2006, however, Nielsen announced a "sweeping" plan to revamp its entire methodology to include all types of media viewing in its sample.
Since viewers are aware of being part of the Nielsen sample, it can lead to bias in recording and viewing habits. This criticism is common to many forms of survey research. Audience counts gathered by the self-reporting diary methodology are sometimes higher than those gathered by the electronic meters, which provide less opportunity for response bias. This trend seems to be more common for news programming and popular prime time programming. Also, daytime viewing and late night viewing tend to be under-reported by the diary.
Another criticism of the measuring system itself is that it fails the most important criteria of a sample: it is not random in the statistical sense of the word. Only a small fraction of the population is selected and only those that actually accept are used as the sample size. Compounding matters is the fact that of the sample data that is collected, advertisers will not pay for time shifted (recorded for replay at a different time) programs rendering the 'raw' numbers useless. In many local areas, the difference between a rating that keeps a show on the air and one that will cancel it is so small as to be statistically insignificant, and yet the show that just happens to get the higher rating will survive. As the possible choices increase so does the margin of error resulting in the sampling sizes being too small.
In 2004, News Corporation retained the services of public relations firm Glover Park to launch a campaign aimed at delaying Nielsen's plan to replace its aging household electronic data collection methodology in larger local markets with its newer and more accurate electronic People Meter system. The advocates in the public relations campaign charged that data derived from the newer People Meter system represented a bias toward underreporting minority viewing, which could lead to a de-facto discrimination in employment against minority actors and writers. Nielsen countered the campaign by revealing its sample composition counts. According to Nielsen Media Research's sample composition counts, , nationwide, African American Households using People Meters represented 6.7% of the Nielsen sample, compared to 6.0% in the general population. Latino Households represent 5.7% of the Nielsen sample, compared to 5.0% in the general population. This showed that ethnic minorities were actually overrepresented in the sample, contrary to what was charged in the News Corporation's public relations campaign.
Another criticism of the Nielsen ratings system is its lack of a system for measuring television audiences in environments outside the home, such as college dormitories, transport terminals, bars, and other public places where television is frequently viewed, often by large numbers of people in a common setting. In 2005, Nielsen has announced plans to incorporate viewing by away-from-home college students into its sample. Internet TV viewing is another rapidly growing market for which Nielsen Ratings fail to account for viewer impact. Apple iTunes, atomfilms, YouTube, and some of the networks' own websites (e.g., ABC.com, CBS.com) provide full-length web-based programming, either subscription-based or ad-supported. Though web sites can already track popularity of a site and the referring page, they can't track viewer demographics. To both track this and expand their market research offerings, Nielson purchased NetRatings in 2007.
Furthermore, a new problem has developed primarily with the February sweeps. For the 2001-2002 season, the National Football League moved Super Bowl XXXVI to February, when it was placed in the sweeps period, because of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which postponed the NFL schedule a week. Because of that, starting with the 2003-04 season, the NFL moved the Super Bowl into the sweeps period.
Since the move of the Super Bowl into the sweeps period, Sunday nights in the sweeps period in February is almost guaranteed to be a winner for the network holding the big event on each of the four Sundays – the Super Bowl (alternates among NBC, CBS, FOX), Grammy Awards (moved to Sundays since 2003 except during Olympics, CBS), Daytona 500 (finish moved into prime-time in 2007; FOX), or Academy Awards (moved into the sweeps period in 2004, ABC) and every fourth year, the Winter Olympic Games (next telecast 2010, NBC).
Annual top-rated shows
Nielsen began compiling ratings for television nationally beginning in 1950. Before that year, television ratings were compiled by a number of other sources, including C. E. Hooper and Variety. That company was bought out by Nielsen in February 1950.
These are the programs that finished with the highest average Nielsen rating in each television season:
See also
Further reading
- Anthony Bianco and Ronald Grover. "" BusinessWeek. September 20, 2004.
External links
*Nielsen Media:
Slate (magazine): (February 16, 2004)
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