Audience Ratings

Audience ratings have been important to the mass media from the beginning of radio broadcasting and have continued to be essential components in the business of television. There are several competing systems that gather ratings for broadcasting, but the most prominent of these is the A.C. Nielsen Company, a name that is known to television viewers who have no interest in ratings or advertising decisions at all. The Nielsen ratings have also been the center of controversy for many years because of the fact that they serve such an important purpose to the television networks in determining what programs are broadcast, and more recently they have been controversial within the networks because of a perception that they are not as accurate as the networks would like.

A.C. Nielsen succeeded C.E. Hooper as the most important ratings service in broadcasting. Hooper ratings were the staple of radio from the mid 1940s. Nielsen also started out as a radio ratings service with the use of a meter--the Nielsen Audimeter--created by Robert Elder and others beginning in 1933. The Audimeter was used commercially for the first time in 1935. A.C. Nielsen had established a successful market research business and saw the Audimeter in 1936, recognizing both its advantages and the shortcomings of the existing model. He knew that he would need a substantial number of Audimeters to monitor enough radios to produce statistically significant results. He worked out a deal with the inventors in

Related Essays

Late Night Talk Shows .... and achieved a 3.2 rating to Carson's 5.2; the Hall show is still on because it delivers a core audience advertisers like, though its ratings have slipped .... (2333 9 )

Born To Buy by Juliet B. Schor's .... It is also unlikely that the major networks that pay for their programming by selling audience ratings to advertisers will be willing to forego such sources of .... (1190 5 )

Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture .... It is also unlikely that the major networks that pay for their programming by selling audience ratings to advertisers will be willing to forego such sources of .... (1190 5 )

Black Roles on Television .... Many of these shows were well-received by the audience and achieved good ratings during their run on the network and a life after that in syndication. .... (2643 11 )

TV Show Union Square .... The ratings were effective for them first episode, but the important numbers came in the second week, showing that the program brought back its audience. .... (932 4 )

eholds per year, with priority given to 150 homes that were cable subscribers.4 The Nielsen company has several divisions providing different data to subscribers. The Nielsen Television Index is the service started in 1950 reporting television ratings. The National Audience Composition service supplies people viewing data from a parallel sample of panel households. When Nielsen raised the number of NTI households to 1700 to accommodate cable, it did not increase the NAC sample, leaving the industry unhappy with the NAC service. This fact along with dwindling regard for the accuracy of diary results in an era of growing cable, independent television, and VCR penetration opened the way for a competitor, AGB, in 1983. Nielsen began using peoplemeters in 1974, but no effort was made to introduce such meters until 1983, at which time Nielsen installed a peoplemeter sample which reached 1,000 by 1987.5 The Nielsen Peoplemeter uses a microprocessor-based unit called Homeunit that controls the measurement system installed in a metered household. This is really a family of collection devices, with the specific use determined by cost, ease of installation, and the video equipment of each household. The device used in the majority o

Category: Business - A