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Old 2007-05-07, 07:35   Link #104
SeijiSensei
AS Oji-kun
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
Quote:
Originally Posted by bayoab View Post
Well, in the US with Nielsen, 1% corresponds to 1.1 million households because they assume that there are only 110 million TVs in the US. So the question is what is 1% counting?
1% of 110 million "television households" = 1.1 million households

(A "television household" is one with at least one TV. That constitutes over 99% of households in the US.)

Nielsen doesn't assume there are only 110 million TVs in the US, but 110 million television households. In the sampled households every set is monitored either with a meter or with diaries (one diary per TV). Since most homes in the US have multiple sets it's certainly possible in theory for the sum of the household ratings for all shows in a given timeslot to exceed 100%. (Since some fraction of the households are not watching TV, exceeding 100% may not happen very often in practice. Viewing is highest on Sunday evenings in the winter, but even then if my recollection serves me, only about 70-80% of households have a television turned on.)

Advertisers are usually less interested in household ratings than person ratings (the percent of people watching a given show) and even more interested in the ratings within certain key demographics. For decades the primary target audience was women 18-39 years of age, since they were seen as the primary purchasers of the types of consumer products television has advertised since its infancy. Nowadays there's much more targeted marketing, of course, especially since cable and satellite delivery fractured the audience. To deliver person ratings Nielsen uses "people meters" in some markets and diaries everywhere else. (rooboy and I have talked about these technologies previously in this thread so I won't go into them here.) For instance, Mom and Sis might be watching American Idol on TV #1, while Dad watches The Golf Channel on TV#2, little Bobby plays Halo on TV#3, and TV#4 is turned off. The ladies count toward the person ratings of American Idol, Dad counts toward the person ratings of TGC, and Bobby doesn't count into the ratings of any show. At the household level this household counts twice, once in the ratings for Idol and again in the ratings for TGC.
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