Wired has a piece out this week called "The Nielsen Family Is Dead," exploring the ways in which TV has left the Nielsen ratings system behind, thanks to Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Trendrr, and a bunch of other stuff your parents aren't aware of yet.
The picture below comes to you directly from the set of Community via Fat Neil himself (Charley Koontz). We don't know who wrote it, but the message is clear: anyone named Nielsen better get into Witness Protection and change their name to Smith or something. Because Community's coming. And so is Omar.
"Don't watch Kroll Show if you don’t have a Nielsen box. I honestly don't care. Feel free to DVR it and not watch it because that will somehow help my ratings maybe, but honestly I'm talking to the four of you with a Nielsen box. If you have a Nielsen box, like, who are you? Where do you live? How do I find you? You’re a unicorn and I don't believe that you exist."
- Nick Kroll giving Entertainment Weekly 5 reasons not to watch his new Comedy Central series Kroll Show and putting forth a pretty valid theory that Nielsen families don't really exist.
It's easy to understand why people are ambivalent, or even hostile, toward ratings. The thinking goes something like this:
1. People love the shows that they love, a lot 2. Some of these shows get canceled "too soon" 3. They get canceled, almost invariably, because of what some mean old bully named Nelson said. Nielsen. I mean Nielsen.
To intensify your heartburn, the validity of these ratings is seemingly taken for granted. When you find out that your favorite show is getting canceled for having a 1.1 rating, there's never any "but" — just the number. A network might keep a show around for prestige, or on [...]
In the ongoing battle to get Nielsen ratings to even somewhat resemble the reality of who's watching what television shows, a blow has been struck for verisimilitude! There's now a system in place to standardize ratings of television and online ads so that advertisers can actually compare who's getting their ads from which platform. While it may not make any immediate differences to ratings numbers, this new system will certainly mean more information – and when networks sometimes base their content decisions on only half the story (i.e., the live-TV-viewing half), more information is always a good thing.
