We often come across the news stating that a show is highly rated or most watched on any channel. Well, what makes shows high-rated? How do TV services determine TV ratings? It’s something that most of us don’t know and in truth, we don’t even care about it until we see the rating.
Fortunately, we’re here to shed some light on TV ratings and metrics so that you can understand what these are and how they work. Ultimately, you’ll be able to understand how TV services measure these and how you can benefit from them. So, let’s get started:
The Nielson Company
The Nielson Company or the Nielson Media Research is the national measurement service for the television industry in the US. The company monitors the number of people watching a show to record the stats, which are later shared with TV companies, advertisers, media companies, and other related entities.
What’s more, is that the company has been doing this since the 1950s and has effectively recorded and provided the information to the relevant companies. NMR does this using statistical sampling, a technique similar to pollsters, used for election outcome prediction.
As for the measurement, NMR employs people who basically help the company record the stats. Based on what they watch, how often, and how long they watch, NMR takes the data and concludes results for larger populations.
How does the Process Work?
The Nielson Company invites different panelists for their TV rating process. These are selected strategically since otherwise, the data collected will be flawed. From gender to household income, Nielson collects information before choosing panelists.
In addition, the panelists are monitored for their interaction with the content they view. With meters installed on panelists’ TVs, the company then measures what they’re watching and other related stats. This helps the decision makers to build something valuable for the customers. Similarly, Xfinity (an internet service provider) takes the feedback and improves Xfinity customer service.
The information related to the channel or content broadcasted is collected and Nielson audits the information in order to achieve measurements for the samples. An interesting thing is that with the changing dynamics, Nielson has also adopted ways of collecting information from different TV programming resources.
Nielson Streaming Video Ratings
In addition to TV ratings, the company is also responsible for accumulating video streaming ratings since as of the 20th century, viewers have shifted to viewing content on DVR, on-demand, streaming services, etc. Gathering insights from multiple streaming platforms isn't always easy, but having your streaming in one place can make it simpler. Finding the ratings can help to determine how each streaming site is performing.
The Nielson Streaming Video Ratings acknowledges this shift in viewer preferences and accounts for the ratings too. However, the ratings don’t account for viewership outside the US, which means that the data couldn’t be accurate.
Even though there’s a great focus on streaming services now, advertisers pay a good sum to NMR for airing commercials on TV programs. Moreover, specific data has to be collected so that TV services can know what shows to keep airing.
Software for Measuring User Ratings
With the expansion of digital media, there was a dire need for NMR to use the latest software for measuring different metrics for content viewing.
Based on this, NMR, in 2010, launched GTAM, or Global Television Audience Metering, which encompassed audience-metering technology. This technology allowed the company to overcome previously faced challenges including collecting video viewing behavior, behavioral data collection across multiple media platforms, etc.
It also allowed the company to use active and passive measurement technologies without using a physical connection to the media source for functionality.
New Media Calculations
The company uses online surveys as well as telephonic interviews to collect digital media figures. Other sources involve using the number of hits on the internet pages, video content consumption, distribution of the content, offline sales to media, people’s interaction on social media, and more.
The most challenging aspect of audience behavioral measurement is recording information from multi-channel transitions. The sampling techniques are only effective when there’s uniform nationwide availability of the programming and technologies.
Also, access to the cable data is limited since many cable providers don’t offer access to their setup boxes for recording the data. Hence, it became difficult for NMR and other companies in the domain to collect information.
However, as with the use of digital media, a significant development was seen in the use of new advertising methods and strategies. These methods and strategies also created new openings for measuring user content viewing data.
In other words, engagement with these new ad methods led to accumulating automated audience measurement, which included the nature of the audience viewing the content, the content being viewed, the amount of time spent on viewing, audience interest rate, and more.
Concluding Thoughts
Today, most audience behavioral engagement stats are measured via the internet. It’s done by improving the existing methods of measurement according to what’s needed and how to collect it via different media sources. In other words, the internet is the most measurable media that NMR can engage with for the purpose.
https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question433.htm
https://www.nielsen.com/
