Nielsen Media Research
Nielsen Media Research is an American firm that measures media audiences, including television, radio, theatre, films, and newspapers. Headquartered in New York City, it is best known for the Nielsen ratings, an audience measurement system of television viewership that has long been the deciding factor in canceling or renewing television shows by television networks. As of August 2024, it is the primary part of Nielsen Holdings.
NMR began as a division of ACNielsen, a marketing research firm founded in 1923. In 1996, NMR was split off into an independent company, and in 1999, it was
purchased by the Dutch conglomerate VNU. In 2001, VNU also purchased ACNielsen, bringing both companies under the same corporate umbrella for years. NMR is also a sister company to Nielsen//NetRatings, which measures Internet and digital media audiences. VNU was reorganized and renamed the Nielsen Company in 2007. NMR was separated again from NielsenIQ in 2021.
History
The Nielsen TV ratings have been produced in the United States since the 1950–51 television season, statistically measuring which programs are watched by segments of the American population. The most well-known portion is the "diary". During the four "sweeps" months of February, May, July and November, Nielsen interviewers in Oldsmar, Florida, and Radcliff, Kentucky, ask homes to fill out a one-week diary of the programs watched in their household.The Nielsen sample included about 1,700 homes with audiometers and a rotating group of nearly 850 diary respondents by the early 1980s. Nielsen launched its Nielsen Homevideo Index in 1980 to measure cable, pay cable, and VCRs; the NHI began offering daily cable ratings in 1982, with steady expansions made into the mid-2000s. In 2003, Nielsen began adjusting its counting methods and emphasized its sample in response to demographic changes and requests from some industry sectors. Nielsen introduced its automated Local People Meter technology in New York and Los Angeles. The LPM enhanced Nielsen's measurement method by shifting from an active, diary-based system to a passive, meter-monitored one. The LPM accurately measures local-level markets instead of relying on a national sample. While diary-based surveys focused on quarterly sweeps, the industry has shifted towards year-round measurement thanks to the automated LPM system.
In 1996, Nielsen Media Research began tracking computer, internet, and video game usage through telephone surveys. Nielsen Media Research is a sister company to Nielsen NetRatings, which measures internet and digital media audiences l telephone and internet surveys, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which measures consumer-generated media. Nielsen also conducts market research for the film industry through National Research Group.
In September 2018, Nielsen acquired SuperData Research, an industry analysis firm that tracks viewing habits within the video game and esports spaces, which Nielsen planned to expand into. Later, in April 2021, Nielsen stated it would close SuperData and merge its analysis and tracking into Nielsen Sports.
In September 2020, Nielsen began compiling a weekly top 10 list of most-watched shows on streaming platforms.
After the divestiture of NielsenIQ in 2021, Nielsen became solely a media audience measurement and analytics firm.
Nielsen TV ratings
Nielsen TV ratings are the audience measurement systems operated by Nielsen Media Research that seek to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States using a rating system. Nielsen lost accreditation by the Media Rating Council in 2022 due to inaccurate data reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, but regained it in April 2023.Nielsen Media Research was founded by Arthur C. Nielsen, a market analyst who began his career in the 1920s with marketing research and performance analysis. The company subsequently expanded into radio market analysis in the late 1930s, culminating in the Nielsen Radio Index in 1942, which was meant to provide statistics as to the markets of radio shows. The first Nielsen ratings for radio programs were released the first week of December 1947. They measured the top 20 programs in four areas: total audience, average audience, cumulative audience, and homes per dollar spent for time and talent.
In 1950, Nielsen then moved to television, developing a rating system using the methods he and his company had developed for radio. That method became the primary source of audience measurement information in the American television industry. In September 2020, Nielsen began compiling a weekly top 10 list of most-watched shows on streaming platforms.
Measuring ratings
The data collection methods used to generate Nielsen TV ratings included:- The Audimeter was used from 1950 during the early days of television broadcasting. It attached to a television and recorded the channels viewed, onto a 16mm film cartridge that was mailed weekly to company headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, and used to generate the Nielsen Television Index. It was based on an earlier Audimeter that had been developed for the 1942 Nielsen Radio Index. Randomly selected "Nielsen families" homes were enticed to accept the Audimeter by including free TV repair service provided by TV Index reps, which was a valuable commodity when vacuum tube televisions predominated.
- Paper "viewer diaries", in which a household recruited by the company self-recorded its viewing or listening habits. This adjunct Nielsen Station Index Service offered since 1953 targeted various demographics, particularly for local programming. The resulting statistical models provided a report of the audiences of any given show, network, and programming hour. The company phased out this methodology as electronic data collection became more sophisticated. As of June 28, 2018, the Nielsen paper TV diary rating service was retired.
- In 1971, the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter allowed electronically recorded program viewing history to be forwarded to Nielsen via a telephone line, making overnight ratings possible.
- The upgraded People Meter, introduced in 1987, records individual viewing habits of the home and transmits the data nightly to Nielsen through a telephone line. This system is designed to allow market researchers to study television viewing on a minute-to-minute basis, recording when viewers change channels or turn off their television.
- Nielsen replaced People Meters with Portable People Meters, which collects the data of individual household members through the use of separate login credentials and allows the company to separate household viewing information into diverse demographic groups.
In July 2017, Nielsen announced that it would include select programs from subscription-based video on demand services Hulu and YouTube TV in its Digital in TV Ratings system. Since about October 2017, Nielsen also began to track select programs from Netflix. Partnering distributors insert a "tag" into the program to be distributed on these services, which Nielsen then tracks through its meters system. Partnering distributors are able to determine if these ratings can be released publicly or not.
Ratings/share and total viewers
The most commonly cited Nielsen results are reported in two measurements: ratings points and share, usually reported as: "ratings points/share". There were 119.6 million TV homes in the United States for the 2017–18 TV season. Nielsen re-estimates the number of television-equipped households each August for the upcoming television season.The rating of a program is a fraction of the HUT. It is calculated as RTG = HUT × SHARE where HUT is Homes Using Television and SHARE is the percentage of TV sets in use which are tuned to a particular show.
Share is the percentage of television sets in use, Households Using Television or Persons Using Television who are tuned to a specific program, station or network in a specific area at a specific time. For example, Nielsen may report a show as receiving a 4.4/8 during its broadcast; this would mean that they estimate that 4.4% of all television-equipped households were tuned in to that program, while 8% of households that were watching TV at that time were watching the specific program.
Because ratings are based on samples, it is possible for shows to get a 0.0 rating, despite having an audience; CNBC's talk show McEnroe was one notable example. Another example is The CW show, CW Now, which received two 0.0 ratings in the same season. In 2014, Nielsen reported that American viewership of live television had dropped 12 minutes per day compared to the year before. The CW got another 0.0 rating for its broadcast of the 1st Critics Choice Super Awards. Nielsen reported several reasons for the shift away from live television: increased viewership of time-shifted television and viewership of internet video.
Viewer location: out of home, on the go
In 2007, Nielsen began to release data that reflected out-of-home/not via home TV viewing.This was a follow-up to their added inclusiveness regarding family members who are dorming in college.
Demographics
Since specific demographics influence advertising rates, Nielsen provides statistics by categories including age, sex, race, economic class, and area. For example, an advertiser might look for younger viewers, for older or wealthier audiences, or for women rather than men.In general, the number of viewers within the 18–49 age range is more important than the total number of viewers. According to Advertising Age, during the 2007–08 season, ABC was able to charge $419,000 per commercial sold during its medical drama Grey's Anatomy, compared to only $248,000 for a commercial during CBS' CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, despite CSI having almost five million more viewers overall. Because of its strength in young "demos", NBC was able to charge almost three times as much for a commercial during Friends as CBS charged for Murder, She Wrote, even though the two series had a similar amount of total viewership during the two seasons they were on the air concurrently. Glee and The Office drew fewer total viewers than NCIS during the 2009–10 season, but earned an average of $272,694 and $213,617 respectively, compared to $150,708 for NCIS.