Social networks and ratings of Nielsen

The ends of Nielsen Rating

Since the 1970s, television has been ruled by the Nielsen Family, that provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior, gauging how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set.

But the time has been changing and with it the technology, introducing new tools to participate in a developed world as platforms to watch diferent kind of programs that people used to watch on a conventional televisión or in theater.

Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon, Prime, Roku, iTunes, Tablets, Smarthopones, among others are the new toys that the globalization has given to the humanity by using internet. All this platforms permit to watch programs just downloading the program or episode typing it in the browser.

Nevertheless, all this platforms allow to watch program that people used to watch by television without the necessity to turn on a television, Nielsen ratings do not measure up, unleashing a problema for two principal reasons.

First of all, because the TV experience does not stop when the episode ends, because people can watch with tablets or laptops the rest of episodes or even more look up an actor’s page, and Second because Nielson ratings do not measure social networks.

Social Network “is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations) and a set of the dyadic ties between these actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures”

In other words, social network is a social structure to allow to have relationships between individuals, groups, organization, societies, or a space to exposure the opinions, for example people can tweet about an episode that Nielsen’s does not care on its calculation rating.

Nowadays facebook and twitter are the most important social network in the world, where people, actors, programs, governemts, etc are free to exposure the ideas and get feedback to the interested parts, opinions that Nielsen ignores .

Nevertheless, Nielsen has developed more sophisticated sampling methods since its founding in Chicago in 1923, for example Nilsen at the beginning used a deviced called the audimeter, then used another advices, but by the late 1950’s, Nielsen sat comfortably and with few competitors, reason why the stop innovating.

But, today with networks the lesson is other, and people prefer interacts with this platforms, so the way that the shows are valued at this moment is other, and the analytics companies as Nielsen will change the way to calculate the value of the programs. People do not turn on a tv to watch a program they just can watch on youtube in a free moment

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