Nielsen ratings: Why has no one disrupted nielsen ratings? | Hacker News Reader

Nielsen ratings: Why has no one disrupted nielsen ratings?

13 pointsrgovind9 comments

I have a nielsen box and I find it to be a 50 yr technology. I don't understand why they need 5 boxes (For user input box, one cable box, two modems, and some adapter for power) for what one can nowadays do in a simple phone. Its also very user unfriendly.

Why do TV companies still use nielsen ratings?

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Disrupt what? Building custom hardware boxes and paying people to gather their behavioral data? I can't see a lot of young hackers jumping on this problem.

Nielsen's actual business is getting data (staggeringly enormous amounts of data - not just TV watching but consumer purchase data, retail POS data, etc), and then leveraging it. If you want to disrupt something, it's the collection and use/sale of this information.

However, there is a strong network effect here. The value of the data you collect is proportional to how established you are and how much participation/penetration you have in an industry. Big companies (like TV/media companies, retail chains, and manufacturers) want big data from big providers. They want large amounts of reliable data that speaks for an entire industry, nationwide and worldwide, to inform their very-high-dollar decisions. If you can collect that, and convince e.g. Walmart that your data is worth buying, go for it!

I think a lot of people have, privately at least. My guess for why they are still around is the fact that they have literally become a household name and have the infrastructure to back it up.

As far as technology, you hit the nail on the head. A simple Android / iPhone app could literally replace all 5 boxes. I gasped when I heard they are still using modems, jeeze.

Nielsen knows that people lie on TV surveys. They need to monitor and compare that to surveys.

Nielsen presumably has also weighted the results from the sample set properly (or picked a representative sample) so that it's indicative of the nation. The results from an Android app would need to be analyzed by a polling firm for them to have the same usefulness.

Do you get paid for keeping that Nielsen box? That is a doubt i've always had.

An idea I have for the late Idea Sunday: a mobile app where the user let it on next to him while watching TV and it recognize what is he seeing by the sound. No need for input or action by the user.

Yes. I get paid a princely sum of $25 per month. I been Thinkig on same lines as you but there are some challenges. You need detailed demographics information on per household basis(age sex occupation appliances in home number if cars education etc).also whatever data u have must prove to tv studios and networks to be more useful than existing Nielsen ratings. but since Nielsen only uses 50000 boxes in entire USA, you demographics information those not detailed May be more useful. Anyone interested in brainstorming?

I think viggle is trying to disrupt this space. They use audio matching to "check-in" to shows from your phone, which earn you points you can redeem for tangible rewards, all while collecting viewer data at a more granular level than a neilson box.

Not sure about the US, but in the UK Sky/Virgin Media set top boxes are internet connected. I'd be very surprised if they didn't send viewing stats home.

They can track what the set-top boxes are watching in the US too, but advertisers don't care how many TVs are turned on; they care how many people are watching and what the demographics of those people are. Set-top boxes can't capture that information.

For someone to disrupt Nielsen, they would need to collect demographic information about the people watching, not just the number of devices that are watching.

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