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Originally Posted by Mr. Nerfect
Great post. 
My stance has been that the ratings matter as much as important decision makers want them to matter. A great rating, as they see it, is going to be used as justification to keep you. A number they don’t value can be used to hang you. It can even be the same number interpreted differently. Is 750k good or bad? Depends on who’s looking at it and how.
Had no clue about NBC developing their own methods.
I’m surprised with so much being digital and the technological advancements that I assume have been in most houses for some time that there isn’t some sort of instant feedback when it comes to viewing habits and the like. I assumed this would be the case when my parents got upgraded to digital cable in, like, 2006 or whenever. I just assumed FOXTEL knew exactly how many people were watching one thing at one time.
Nielsen themselves state a 10% margin of error. That’s fucking huge. Rampage may have gotten 662k this week or 540k. That’s a huge chunk of audience that it just doesn’t know how to count. And what if you just watch wrestling at your parents’ house because you don’t have cable. No sense getting it for wrestling. Or if you watch it with friends? Just a really wonky way to measure viewing habits, as you said. |
Yeah, but the reality is, every advertiser is still using Nielsen data to determine their ad rates. Every network is still using Nielsen data behind the scenes in everything they do, they're just supplementing it with other data sources, which has also been common for two decades now. I've done three TV deals and two advertiser deals with multiple networks in the last month alone, every network and advertiser was using Nielsen data as their primary source of data to determine the deal structure. I know for a fact that NBC is still using Nielsen data. I'm in the process of doing a deal with them for a new show next year and they're basing almost the entire contract's pay structure on what new shows typically get in ad rates due to, you guessed it, key demo ratings from Nielsen data. The fact is, despite their flaws (no one says they're not flawed, but that's not what were talking about), Nielsen (not unlike WWE when people think of wrestling) is the gold standard and because of their history, finances, and influence, they're not going to go away anytime soon. That's why the ratings and demos matter, because the business and industries say they do.