Comments on: Changes at Nielsen: Rating Representation and Surveillance

By: Jonathan Gray

Jonathan Gray — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:48:29 +0000

Thanks to both of you for your comments. It is that weird thing with the Nielsen “voting” system, isn’t it? We know how our votes work and count in a democracy, but with Nielsen or Hey! Nielsen, yes we vote, but we don’t know how those votes work and count. Reminds me of the confusion I felt filling out teacher evaluation forms as a student, especially since my undergrad uni asked all sorts of demographic info too (including what my GPA was. I wondered, for instance, if my GPA was worse would they value my ideas less?). So I’m suspicious, and I’m grumbly, but at the same time, at least it’s some form of metric to account for qualitative evaluation. When network promos say things like “last week, X million Americans fell in love with Show Y,” I laugh, since Nielsen has done so little to measure “love” of shows, but at least Hey! Nielsen shows a reflection on the need to start doing that

By: Eleanor Baird

Eleanor Baird — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:23:02 +0000

Jonathan, thanks for your comments on my http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2007/09/hey_nielsenwhats_the_metric.php#more “>post on the C3 blog. I completely agree that Nielsen is doing this primarily as a way to feed more information to networks and advertisers – that’s the business they’re in. And I agree that the way that audiences are valued is somewhat flawed. However, I do still think that Hey! Nielsen is at least an attempt to talk directly to audiences and gather their input, and an acknowledgment that things have changed and that metrics can and should be revamped. And, rather than just trawl blogs and lurk in chat rooms, I don’t see anything inherently wrong in asking people directly about what they like and letting whoever is interested participate. I think Myles makes a good point, that a lot of the reaction to Hey!Nielsen stems from it being “corporate” and not knowing really how it works or what difference you’re actually making by going there.

For me, your post raises some interesting questions about the implicit contract between audiences, networks and advertisers to share information. I don’t have a good answer to that right now, and I think it will need to be worked out as the various players establish how they fit into the new logics and economics of the industry.

You raised questions in your post about audience measurement and representativeness of the samples, and they are good questions. I think it may have more to do with how they choose their sample or construct their confidence intervals than the sheer number of people/households in the current sample, but I don’t think that that information is readily available. One thing that sort of perplexes me about Hey! Nielsen is that the sample there is self-selecting, so I would question how representative a sample Hey!Nielsen users are of the general TV-watching population, which goes back to the question of what the data can really be used for.

By: Myles

Myles — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:52:26 +0000

Hey! Nielsen is an interesting beast of sorts, but I think that the reference to TWoP is perhaps the most telling one. There, you get complex analysis, bitterness and a rather complete spectrum of reactions to each and every episode. On Hey! Nielsen, you get fan groups rushing in the opening week before becoming frustrated that nothing is happening.

Hey! Nielsen can’t possibly offer real change, nor can it actually show users what their opinions mean to the future of television. However, they purport to be playing that role, something which TWoP does not do despite perhaps being a greater influence than Hey! Nielsen ever will. I think a lot of it also has to do with who the audience reaches: the Networks Hey! Nielsen claims to reach are corporations, the enemy, while TWoP reaches the producers and creators who actually want to make a difference.

I’ve been talking to some fans who have been using the site, and they all felt ill-informed as to how it worked, but more importantly really don’t understand what difference they’re making: it’s just another site they spread their message to in hopes of it catching on.