How do television networks know viewer statistics?
In: Technology
Ha! I was asking myself the same question a couple months ago.
Apparently the TV company selects a sample of (consensual) families who get a special device that is able to record their activity and info about them and to send it to the company.
They all register and when they turn on the TV they select their profile, so that there’s also information about who’s watching what. In the end, they get paid
There is a small statistically significant sample size of selected viewers who agreed to have a box connected to their TVs which measures their TV watching behavior. Then it’s a simple matter of extrapolation.
Already answered for modern times, but back before smart TV’s and tracking boxes, the 4 main TV channels in the UK would have staggered advert times. viewership would be estimated by the surge in demand for power when everyone got up to boil the kettle to make a cup of tea.
I don’t know if similar methods were used elsewhere, but it makes me proud to be British realising our tea drinking is so predictable.
Many replies talking about the old systems, where a sample of random viewers would have devices that report back to the company… But the 1990s are over, and now that isn’t really true.
In reality, in many cases today your cable box is straight up telling the cable company what you’re watching, at all times, so long as the tv is on.
The consequences of this are pretty wild. For example, a decade ago a friend of mine was interning at Google. She was working on the “TV ads” team. Google had bought up the ads to an entire cable company in <state> in return for the data of what people were watching. Based on the data, targeted ads were shown. If you and your neighbor watched the same channel, you got different ads. Or at least that was the plan.
That was ten years ago. Can’t imagine how complex it is now.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-cable-company-know-what-I-am-viewing-on-my-TV-What-do-they-do-with-that-information
As already stated in other comments, there are measurement boxes (called people meters) or booklets.
Alternatively, maybe more common nowadays, smart TV’s and your box receiving and transcoding signals from satellites are connected to the Internet, so it can report stats.
Also, the content might be delivered directly through the Internet on-demand in a case of IPTV and OTT. “On-demand” means that when you choose channel (IPTV) or a movie (e.g. Netflix), a request is sent to the provider and they send you back the content. Just like on Youtube. So providers have very precise statistics about what content flows through the network out of their servers. They know what do you watch, how long do you watch, if you switch the channel during ads and so on.
In college, when we moved into our off campus apartment, a lady appeared at our door asking if we wanted to be a Nielson (the rating company) family as the previous tenants were. I immediately dismissed it as her trying to sell something and closed the door. She came back later with a free pizza and some flowers or something. We invited her in and she told us about how it worked. It was super easy. We had to fill out a ton of info about ourselves, what cars we drove what products we used. And we had boxes hooked up to the TV’s. She sent us gifts throughout the year like pizza and candy. It was actually super fun. We used to jokingly yell at my one roommate for watching trash tv and making us look bad.
Different countries have different methods.
In the U.S. (and I believe the UK) as some others have mentioned households hook boxes up to their TV set up and their viewing behaviour is captured and sent to the ratings company. Household members have a little remote to indicate which members of the household are watching the set. I believe diaries have been phased out in the US though I could be wrong.
In Canada, household members agree to carry around little devices that pick up silent codes from TV programs and send this data back to the ratings company. This technology is used in other countries as well and in Canada it’s also used to measure radio listening. In smaller markets household members fill out diaries detailing their viewing (there are two waves, one in Fall, one in Spring).
Can’t speak to the other countries, but there are a few other ways I’ve seen other groups measure it including next day telephone surveys.
Old way? On one way broadcast media, there would be a group of people who got a box installed that kept track and reported which channels they watched in return for freebies.
New way? With ip based systems they look up your browsing history and know its you because you logged in using your google/ facebook id.
Most of these answers are how it *used*to work. Not anymore. SmartTVs changed that. Something like 25% of devices now scan the images on the screen and “capture” what youre watching. For TVs using Roku, AppleTV, Fire stick, or Chromecast, those vendors have…interesting agreements about what they can or can’t know about what you’re watching from an app perspective.. with YouTube tv, Hulu, sling, all bets are off. Nielsen used to have free rein here, but no longer. 2017 Congress started letting internet providers sell info about the data being consumed in your home. For tv that’s easier than you think because all cable boxes are digital now. And that’s why Comcast, at&t, verizon, etc became advertising companies AND their own networks. At&t buying HBO etc.
It was always, as already mentioned, an extrapolation. And a faulty one i might add.
Now with many people watching stuff on online networks we have way more accurate data.
I mean even the incentive of a monetary compensation will screw the data gathered. Not to mention that most people don’t care about it. In my opinion most of that data was essentially useless when gathered.
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