Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: it's me Christian Seger. We have all heard about TV ratings.
Speaker 1: They're just an estimate of how many people are watching
Speaker 1: a particular show at a given time, and they are
Speaker 1: a big deal. As of people in the US watched
Speaker 1: about thirty four hours of TV each week, Billions of
Speaker 1: AD dollars hang in the balance, and if a show
Speaker 1: doesn't perform, then it risks getting axed. We're all familiar
Speaker 1: with it. More than a few fans have been disappointed
Speaker 1: when low ratings doom their favorite shows to cancelation. And
Speaker 1: without naming any names, it's fair to say that some
Speaker 1: viewers are surprised when shows they hate continue through season
Speaker 1: after season after season due to high ratings. But what
Speaker 1: are these ratings anyways, where do they come from, and
Speaker 1: why are they so important? Well, in the United States
Speaker 1: and Canada, TV ratings are synonymous with one company, Nielsen,
Speaker 1: which was founded in nineteen twenty three by an engineer
Speaker 1: named Arthur Nielsen. Originally, he wanted to sell engineering performance surveys,
Speaker 1: a way to measure the efficiency and quality of engineering operations.
Speaker 1: By ninety two, Nielsen expanded, creating a retail index that
Speaker 1: tracked purchases in the food and drug markets. This was
Speaker 1: the first successful attempt to measure these markets on a
Speaker 1: wide scale, and by nineteen fifty the company applied this
Speaker 1: technique to a little industry called television. Today, Nielsen measures
Speaker 1: the number of people watching television shows and makes its
Speaker 1: data available to cable networks as well as advertisers and
Speaker 1: the media. The company uses a technique called statistical sampling
Speaker 1: to rate the shows. This is the same technique that
Speaker 1: polsters used to predict the outcomes of elections. Nielsen creates
Speaker 1: a sample audience and counts how many people in that
Speaker 1: audience view you each program. They extrapolate from the sample
Speaker 1: and estimate the number of viewers in the entire population
Speaker 1: watching the show to find out who's watching what. The
Speaker 1: company gets thousands of households to become part of the
Speaker 1: representative sample for the national ratings estimates. These participants are
Speaker 1: randomly selected, and they're paid a little bit but not
Speaker 1: near enough to you know, quit their day jobs and
Speaker 1: watch TV full time. Every US household with a TV
Speaker 1: theoretically has a chance to be a part of the sample,
Speaker 1: but the sample itself is not very large. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just a few thousand households extrapolated to represent millions
Speaker 1: right well. To make up for this, the company measures TVs, homes, programs,
Speaker 1: and people in a variety of ways. The data is
Speaker 1: broken down by demographic, type of stream, and so on.
Speaker 1: This representative sample is compared to the general population, and
Speaker 1: Nielsen also calls thousands of household to see if their
Speaker 1: TV sets are on and who is watching. But the
Speaker 1: phone survey could happen to anyone fitting the criteria, and
Speaker 1: it could also be a one time thing. So what
Speaker 1: about the genuine Nielsen families, you know, the one Nielsen
Speaker 1: monitors continually. Well. To find out what these people are watching,
Speaker 1: the company installs a black box on the TVs in
Speaker 1: a home. This isn't the same as a black box
Speaker 1: on a plane. No, it's just a computer and a modem.
Speaker 1: The box keeps track of when the TV is on
Speaker 1: and what it's tuned to. Every night, the box gathers
Speaker 1: up the households viewing data and sends all of this
Speaker 1: information to the company's central computer. By monitoring what is
Speaker 1: on TV at any given time, the company is able
Speaker 1: to keep track of how many people watch, which program
Speaker 1: that seems fine, but how do we know who is
Speaker 1: watching what? Well, after all, not everyone in a household
Speaker 1: is going to love the same shows. That's where the
Speaker 1: people meters come in. These are small boxes placed near
Speaker 1: the TV sets of those in the national sample. They
Speaker 1: measure who is watching by giving each member of the
Speaker 1: household a button to turn on and off to show
Speaker 1: when he or she begins and ends viewing. This information
Speaker 1: is also collected each night. The national TV ratings have
Speaker 1: relied on these meters for years. To ensure reasonably accurate results,
Speaker 1: the company uses audits and quality checks. They also regularly
Speaker 1: compare the ratings they get from different samples and measurement methods. So,
Speaker 1: for example, a one point oh Nielsen rating indicates that
Speaker 1: one percent of the one hundred and fifteen point nine
Speaker 1: million estimated TV watching households tuned into a program. The
Speaker 1: data is also broken off into different demographic ratings, the
Speaker 1: most important being people ages eighteen to thirty four. Now,
Speaker 1: make no mistake, this research is worth billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Advertising rates are based on Nielsen's data. That's why a
Speaker 1: thirty second commercial on one show might cost twice as
Speaker 1: much as a commercial on a low rated show programmers
Speaker 1: also use Nielsen's data to decide which shows to keep
Speaker 1: and which to cancel. A show that has several million
Speaker 1: viewers may seem popular to us, but a network may
Speaker 1: need millions more watching that program to make it a
Speaker 1: financial success. That's why some shows with loyal following still
Speaker 1: get canceled. Sorry, Firefly, and there's an elephant in the
Speaker 1: room here too. The way people watch TV is changing.
Speaker 1: With DVRs, Netflix and other streaming services, TV viewers are
Speaker 1: more likely to customize their viewing habits, watching stuff when
Speaker 1: they want to see it, rather than when it happens
Speaker 1: to be on Nielsen has ways of measuring some of this,
Speaker 1: but not all of it. As viewing habits continue to
Speaker 1: fragment across different platforms, advertisers, content creators, and audience members
Speaker 1: alike are right to ask how accurate these ratings actually are.
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Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.