So I heard the other day that this years Superbowl was the 3rd highest rated broadcast EVER with, if I remember right, 94 million households tuning in.
I, myself tuned in to watch. But my question is, besides this post how in the hell does anyone know that I watched the Superbowl? And how do they know that the other 93,999,999 people watched?

those damn neilson boxes that only like 150,000 people have. They judge tv viewership based on the percentage of people that watch a certain show with the boxes

Because they said so.

Stop asking questions or they'll be sending people over to your house...

I figured it was something retarded like that. So the number 94 million has no factual reality, it's just something Neilson pulls out of their asses...
That's like saying that 3 people on my street like football so that means 3 people on the street next to me like football too.

Statistically, the Nielson spread is supposed to be pretty accurate. Never understood it myself, but that's what they say, so it's a little more scientific than you might think.

So why cant they implement this in every television?

Um, no.

Polling statistics involve highly complex sampling methods. They do a pretty good job of measuring who is watching in any specific demographic. I believe they changed their methods a few years ago to adapt to the use of DVRs.

What I don't get is how they figure how many people watched the Superbowl when a fair number of them watched at bars, restaurants and parties. I'm really curious to know how Nielson knows how many people came over and watched the game at my house.

They don't know how many people came over to your house because you are not part of the sample (I'm assuming). What they probably do know is how many people were at the house of the people in the sample because they have to fill out diaries recording their viewing habits.

They use this information to get a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of people who watched the show.

Now you are catching on. Just don't tell the advertisers.

I thought they actually stopped using diaries for the most part, and have gone to the meters instead.

Although I suppose they could use the diaries in addition to the monitors in cases like the Super Bowl, when you have people over to watch.

The meters have ways of accounting for non-household viewers (ie, guests)

I've done the diaries a couple of times. My tv viewing habits change a bit when I have it--I make it much more of a point to watch my favorites and not to flick around and end up watching crap.

I got an F in Statistics in college. Looks like some of you did too.

I got a B+ in advanced stats and I still don't know anything about it, haha.

Why would they do that? Don't most DVR companies keep track of what is watched on their own? I thought advertisers don't care about that because they suspect that most DVR users skip past their commercials anyway.

What I don't understand is how they account for people with a high end setup... I always heard that the Nielson box degrades your signal, which is why some households decline to use them. Not sure if that changed with the more recent high-def conversions.

There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damn lies and statistics.


I could plug in the formulas, draw the charts, get all the right answers with the best of them, but it still doesn't mean statistics are anything but a crapshoot. I specifically remember hearing from instructors things like "9 out of 10 people love chocolate according to the statistics, but if you walk down a street and ask ten people if they like chocolate, you could get 1 in 10 or 10 in 10".

I always took that to mean statistics are a good way to start your research, but they're by no means a definite answer.

Take Battlestar Galactica for instance: terrible ratings, but it has a massive fanbase and the DVDs sell like crazy. That's why the network has ordered two direct to DVD movies so far (Razor and the upcoming The Plan). Due to statistical sampling and clustering, the fans of the show simply don't overlap with Neilson families.

The use of DVR's to skip commercials and internet downloading (legal and not), will soon sound the death knell for the Neilsons, at least in their current form.

According to my statistics (which I spend many, many seconds working on), 130,449,007 people and animals watched the game.