For those who are not terminally stuck in an archaic system, the Nielsen Company pride themselves on being an “online audience and consumer-generated media measurement” company. The term may seem familiar to you because here in the United States they are how companies rate television viewership also known as Nielsen ratings. This is done by selecting “Nielsen Families” who note what they watch, be it in a diary or via a special set-top box. There are a ton of criticisms of this process, the most basic being that it’s an active step — a participant must remember to log what they watched. More importantly, the participants know that they’re participating, and the amount of so called “power” they have.
Way to collapse the wave-form, jerks.
Put simply, a Nielsen-approved viewer could decide he was going to spend every day watching the most vapid, talentless people in the world and we could suddenly end up with a thousand reality shows. Oh hell, I think it already happened. When this system was created in the 1930s, it made sense because the tools to gauge viewership was limited. But that was back then. It’s the mother-loving 21st century now. Surely, there’s a better way, people?
Time Warner thinks so. They’ve been looking into GetGlue (you might recognize the name from your Facebook feed), which would tweet and post when someone was watching a particular show. Now, Time Warner has shifted their focus to a company called Bluefin. From a Reuters article spotlighting TW’s interest in Bluefin:
Boston-based Bluefin launched its flagship analytics service Bluefin Signals last July for clients to analyze and organize social media conversations about U.S. national television.
The company said clients use the social data about TV shows and commercials to help make buying and selling decisions. Bluefin’s clients include TV networks, marketers and agencies including CBS Corp, Discovery Communications Turner Networks, Starcom MediaVest, MediaCom and MTV.
To date it has collected data from more than 11,000 shows and analyzes more than 5 billion pieces of social media commentary every month.
While this is a step in the right direction, I’d really like to see something a bit more sensible. After all, social data can be manipulated. Why not a hardware solution? Not to go all Big Brother, but why not simply add a meter to existing cable boxes and/or DVRs and have them send anonymous stats back to your cable provider? Your cable provider can then sell that data to networks who want to know what to charge for ads. The stat collecting systems can sample randomly, and give a far better sampling than Twitter. Adjust the vehicle that exists instead of reinventing the wheel.
Anyone remember the Tv show called Whiz Kids? they did an episode where they became a Neilsen family and the first thing any of them thought was if they had that a year ago they could have made Square Pegs the number 1 show in the nation..