How do television networks know viewer statistics?
In: Technology
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
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