Hacker News Reader

Isn’t that basically the point of Nielsen? They go to a lot of trouble to get trustworthy stats about TV viewership so that advertisers can make informed purchase decisions wrt. both stations and programs.

Several companies have tried to fill that role online, but not to much success.

View on HN

The basic attention token (https://basicattentiontoken.org/) seems to have the right characteristics and incentives to fill this role. Any ideas why the others have failed so far? It’s hard to insert yourself as a value-adding middleman in an existing marketplace unless consensus agrees the current configuration is in crisis. It’d be interesting if anyone could find a way to do this for Amazon’s commingled counterfeit inventory, for example.

I don’t know much about the current state of adtech, so I’d be hard-pressed to make specific recommendations. As a broadcast medium, TV stations had basically no data about the number of viewers that they had; Nielsen instrumented a representative sample of consumer TVs and the sold that data to both stations and advertisers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com