CEO David Calhoun has a simple plan for Nielsen: Make gobs of money and reshape the future of marketing and media.
— Fortune Magazine on Nielsen ratings
Good luck with that Dave. TV and radio are by their very nature terrible at measuring what we like. You can’t just broadcast energy waves all over the place and reliably get a user count, to say nothing of measuring how the audience feels or what actions they take based on advertising.
Too bad for old media, Google can measure those things, and Google does it really well:
Even YouTube’s crude data (view counts, ratings, and comments [see example]) are light years beyond what TV networks collect. Here are more things YouTube knows that TV networks can’t:
- What sites embed or link to which videos, and how influential those sites are.
- How engaged the user is. Did they comment? Did they watch the whole thing or fast forward? Did they watch anything else?
- Every users’ neighborhood, ISP, computer type, browser type, and screen resolution, all of which add up to a demographic goldmine.
YouTube is just the part of the iceberg that TV people can relate to. Think about what else Google knows:
- All the traffic patterns that add up to PageRank.
- What people are searching for.
- What ads they click.
- What people Gmail to each other and read in Google Reader.
- With Google Checkout, Analytics, and Adsense I presume they can follow ad performance from the first click to the closed sale.
- In exchange for giving site owners excellent free traffic analysis software in Feedburner and GoogleAnalytics, Google gets intimate knowledge about those sites and can tie all that knowledge together.
- Anything not covered above I presume DoubleClick knows.
Forget Google for a second. What do Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, and MySpace know about our relationships and interests? What do iTunes and Amazon know? What do PirateBay.org and Isohunt.com know?
All of this means TV is doomed. Sure, it will take a while. Sixty years of market dominance and viewer habits won’t be undone at once, but slowly the advertising money in TV will dry up for two reasons:
- As we’ve seen, internet marketing analytics beats the pants off old media marketing data.
- The most desirable consumers are skipping ads, using the internet, or playing video games instead of watching TV.
In that Fortune article, Nielsen’s CEO trots out the old chestnut: “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed”. I would add a corollary: “If your competitor’s measuring stick is a lot bigger and more accurate than yours, they’re going to spank you with it.”
Footnote: I imagine that Nielsen does a reasonably good job, but there’s just no way for them or the TV networks to compete with the likes of Google. Internet giants have campuses full of PhDs inventing algorithms, they have hordes of users giving them real-time feedback, and they have huge data centers to run it all. All TV has is market inertia and the talent who actually make shows (but I hear they’re not too happy these days).
Working title for the next entry in this series: “How Nathan Bowers single handedly saved the TV industry with his mighty web design skills.” Don’t miss it!
- Part 1 in this series: The Death of Television
- Part 3: Internet television is neither
3 Comments ↓
This was just discussed in my TV History class. Most Nielsen families are middle-aged white couples. That’s why CSI is always number one in the ratings, and ultimately why we have five CSI’s, and seven Law & Order’s. Also, Nielsen, AS OF THIS YEAR, has decided that college students/fraternities should now be included in the surveys. This is why shows like Arrested Development have failed to garner a so-called “audience” and are canceled without given a chance. Finally minorities are almost completely ignored. If they weren’t then you might see some Spanish language programs listed in the top 10. The whole thing pisses me off. >:(
Holy crap, it’s worse than I thought. Also partly explains why shows like Futurama, Firefly, and Family Guy are cancelled even though they have plenty of fans.
When canceled shows get distributed in a medium with measurable sales like DVD then it becomes clear that there was a real and devoted audience all along.
Very interesting reading. I am a fan of Jericho, which was cancelled due to low ratings…. According to Nielson, at least.
I believe the viewers were out there, using various other mediums to watch that were available….but those methods weren’t included in the ratings numbers.
Jericho may get a new home…..I would love to see that happen. But it’s sad to realize that there are so many other shows that deserved to continue, but were cancelled because of ratings. It’s time for the viewers to make their preferences known. Write the networks and let them know which shows you want kept.
And definitely check out articles like this one to stay informed.