Most of these estimates of “xxx number of people worldwide watched this event” are pulled out of nowhere and don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Like they said 1.9 billion people watched the Royal Wedding in 2011, which is nearly 1 in 3 people on earth.
But when you look at the more accurate figures for the UK alone, less than 1 in 4 people watched it there.
Same with the claim that over a billion people watch the Superbowl. Never mind the fact its appeal outside the US is limited, for most of the world it’s on in the middle of the night or on Monday morning.
Back then, there were services that would do statistical studies. Nielson which might have heard of was one. We would occasionally get a log book and were asked to track what we watched. At the end of the period, the books were mailed back.
There were some that had electrical devices that you pushed a button on to indicate if you were watching abc, cbs, or nbc. There were only a few Channels back then.
I can’t confirm this, but it would be possible for companies to take polls, much like politicians do today and ask questions like “Did you watch? How many people?l and then with a small sample size of 1000 or so, you can extrapolate a total.
The other measuring services used similar statistical models to guess the number of viewers.
They don’t actually know how many people watched it. With broadcast TV you can’t know who is actually receiving the broadcast and whose TV is turned on at that channel.
What they did was simply survey. Ask a large group of people whether they watched the moon landing on TV and extrapolate from there to the entire population. That’s basically how TV ratings were measured.
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