Television Ratings. How are they calculated?

Question

I never quite understand how television shows get their ratings. How do they know how many people watches a show, when the average person switches channel during commericials all the time.

Answer 1

Neilson Media Research is the primary collector of TV ratings. The use devices called PeopleMeters on a select number of family's televisions across America. These 50,000 families represent the 100,000,000+ television viewing households and the data they collect from these units is converted into national ratings.

The boxes record when people switch away too. They take averages of these also to determine who is actually watching a program.

It used to be done with manual diaries that people wrote things into...but these have fallen out of use.

Answer 2

In multiple ways. First of all from volunteers who are given a box that tracks what they are watching, secondly by journals or 'diaries' voluteers fill out about what they have watched, and thirdly from data purchased from 3rd parties such as DirecTV. All of the data is put together and creates a very accurate picture of what the nation as a whole is watching. I believe if you google for Nielsen Ratings they will explain it all to you on their website

Answer 3

Marketing Research. Volunteers hook up scanners to their televisions that monitor what they watch. They also have scanners to scan your grocery items. Nielsen SoundScan does all the tracking of record sales and I think they are also the big one for television.

No, they don't know what every single person is watching....YET!