As long as it’s not American Idol or Dancing With the Stars of course!
Gossip Girl Cast
After being on hiatus for three weeks Gossip Girl aired new episodes on Monday, March 16, 2009. The next day TV Guide reported that the new episode didn’t bring many viewers. The post called Ratings: Once-Hot Gossip Remains Lukewarm is part of their “thing” to be a serious entertainment magazine, which influences producers a lá Entertainment Weekly – with it’s Fallen Heroes story – taking jabs at Gossip Girl and “how to fix it.”
To quote from Gossip Girl’s Eric Van Der Woodsen: “who watches tv on their television anymore.”
Well, yes some do – thanks to DVRs, but lately a lot of people are watching shows online. Why do you think last year’s writer’s strike happened? They wanted royalties for online shows. When you go to CBS.com or ABC.com to watch your favorite shows you have to watch them with: “limited commercial interruption,” which means someone’s making a profit.
The Nielsen ratings are TV Networks tool in order to sell their shows to advertisers. “Yes advertise here, our show is watched by 20 million viewers – unlike the other network that only gets 2 million at the same time.” TV shows like Lipstick Jungle, Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sex Money and Eli Stone were cancelled because of low viewership, but who’s there to say they didn’t have viewers? Nielsen ratings do count DVR views, but only gives a maximum of a week after the show was original aired to be accounted for. This is semi-understandable given that if Macys’ advertising a “1 Day Sale” and you watch a week later you won’t be informed on time to make a decision. However, there are reports of the Nielsen Ratings not being as accurate as they want us to believe they are.
The Nielsen ratings use three systems to acquire their data:
Nieseln Ratings TV Viewing Diary
- People Meter
The People Meter is an electronic metering system that is placed in randomly selected households. For a nationwide audience measurement 5,000 households are selected. This sample is not large enough because Nielsen’s statistics show that 99 million households have TVs in the United States, but they key is to be representative, well is it?. The people meter measures three things: 1) the tuning station of the tv set 2)what channel is being tuned 3) who’s watching. Each member of a household has an assigned personal viewing button, which helps determine “who” is watching which program.
- Set-Tuning Meter
Is an electronic metering system – used in 49 of the nation’s largest markets – to provide set-tuning information on a daily basis. These samples are collected from a sample of homes, separate than People Meter, and overnight household ratings are rported on a daily basis for these local areas.
- Diary
Diaries are mailed out to randomly selected households in all 210 local markets across the country during the “sweep” months (November, March, May). Each household’s member is asked to write down what programs and channels they watch on a one week period. Every year approximately 1.6 million diaries are collected.
“So families must agree to have their TV watching monitored 24-7 (or to keep extensive diaries about it) and cannot tell anybody about this (Nielsen requires that those it monitors keep the fact confidential) — all for a small amount of money. Why would anybody want to do this? Are the type of people who choose to do this really representative of the TV-watching population as a whole?” The Nielsen Ratings: Just Who, Exactly, Participates?
The Nielsen Ratings have been a flawed system since it’s inception and now with DVR and free online episodes it shows it’s weakness. However, TV Executives will continue to use it without thinking twice. I do believe that soon networks will start profiting from the web and Nielsen will have a quick death, until then let the networks know that you are tuning in, before they tune you out. Congratulations to the CW for ignoring this ratings when it comes to Gossip Girl! The fans thank you.
One last thought:
We should also give shows more than one chance – especially in their first season – if we hadn’t before loved shows such as Friends would never lived through 10 seasons. Viva Laughlin didn’t.
3 Comments
March 19, 2009 at 8:12 pm
[...] Original post by aletorro [...]
March 22, 2009 at 4:05 am
Nice blog, thanks for interesting info
April 8, 2009 at 2:52 pm
[...] I didn’t make this show #1 on this list, is because as I’ve mentioned before on: The Nielsen Ratings Will Kill Your Favorite Show, the CW and show producers have recognized, Gossip Girl is followed mostly online on the CW [...]