America’s Useless TV Ratings System

NUTS to CBS. The executives should be ashamed of themselves for being such an incompetent business people. The cancellation of Jericho is not only a disappointment for the fans but a series of bad business mistakes which have resulted in lost potential revenue: the long break half way during the season, belief that Nielsen Ratings are representative, changing the night Jericho was broadcast on and ultimately not reversing the cancellation when it is obviously a very popular show; just look at the media coverage and Save Jericho campaigns going on since its cancellation was announced. There is obviously a lot of interest and money people are willing to spend on Jericho (take the NUTS to CBS as an example of fans willingness to spend).

Nielsen Ratings are worthless. The system is a bit like Alexa - not everything has the Alexa toolbar installed so the Alexa Rank a site has does not really reflect its popularity. Nielsen Media Research uses a similar method: Set Meters are installed in televisions of selected homes (i.e. not all homes in the USA) and these are using to collect viewing statistics. Basically, some assumptions are made to regarding the rest of the population’s viewing habits and Nielsen Media Research has some “impressive-looking” but effectively useless figures to try and impress TV networks, advertisers, et cetera, with in order to make some cash.

There are so many places and ways now that people watch television and this makes Nielsen Media Research’s current way of calculating ratings highly flawed. There new, alternative ways to watch your favourite TV show are: TiVO, iTunes (i.e. watching the latest TV shows on your mobile phone, MP3/MP4 player), your local bar (most are showing at least sports events on the big screen), college dormitory, TV cards, handheld TVs, et cetera. As these new viewing methods are now used by many thousands of people, Nielsen Media Research’s assumptions, surveys and Set Meters cannot be anywhere near as accurate now as it was 20 years ago.

If CBS really wants to hold faith in Nielsen’s Ratings then they should do some calculations based upon its popularity in so-called “new media”/”social media” such as tv.com and Episode World which are two very popular TV Show sites and it can be seen by browsing them and looking at Jericho’s rankings that it is a very popular show (at the time of writing, Jericho is ranked #24 on tv.com’s Top Shows list and #15 on episodeworld.com for bookmarked shows).