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Television Ratings. How does Nielsen Media
Research "rate" television shows?
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Television Ratings
You just heard that a television show was ranked number one in the NielsenTV ratings.
What does that really mean? How does Nielsen Media Research "rate"
television shows? Why do shows you think are really pretty good get
cancelled?
NielsenTV ratings
are a service of Nielsen Media Research. Nielsen Media Research has
remained the official national measurement service of the television
industry for over 40 years. NielsenTV ratings provide an estimate
of the audience for just about every program that can be seen on television.
But what Nielsen Media Research means by "television ratings" is not the
same as the common usage of the word "rating". Nielsen Media
Research does not provide qualitative evaluations of how much a
program is "liked" when they rate programs.
The television rating is only
the simplest and most democratic measure of the audience: how many
people watched. Programs, which have larger audiences, are, by
definition, the successful ones.
Ratings numbers, which you may have
seen, are the average audience rating, or the percent tuned to a
particular program during the average minute.
So when the NielsenTV
ratings report that a show is "top ranked" for the week, they are
saying that this is the show, which was watched by more people than
anything else on any channel at any time during the week. It is
literally the most popular show because its audience has more of the
population in it.
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