Nielsen has launched a new TV ratings system and it’s a social TV rating system.
The Nielsen TV Rating System has flaws. According to an article on How Stuff Works, Nielsen uses something called statistical sampling. They use a sample audience to calculate the audience for programs and then estimates the number of views for the entire population. If that wasn’t flawed enough, Nielsen counts the live watchers and same day DVR watchers, Split Sider reports. So if you watch a show on your DVR the next day or online, if you are one of the samples, the view is not counted.
Now there is a new ratings system, a social TV system.
Steve Hasker, President, Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen, said on the Nielsen website: “The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media.”
“As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data,” he added.
Posted by Chloe Sladden, the Head of Media for Twitter, posted on The Official Twitter Blog: “As the experience of TV viewing continues to evolve, our TV partners have consistently asked for one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming. This new metric is intended to answer that request, and to act as a complement and companion to the Nielsen TV rating.”
Finally the industry is realizing in this technological age and busy lives we all live, we don’t all watch TV the same way.
So how does this new rating system work? According to the Nielsen website, the total audience of social TV activity on Twitter is measured to give a precise size of the audience of social TV. Nielsen has recently required, SocialGuide, a provider in social TV measurement. SocialGuide measures a unique audience for each show, twitter accounts that send out at least one tweet for an episode, the number of times any tweet was seen and the total amount of Twitter accounts having at least one impression of one or more different tweets about an episode. SocialGuide captures data from U.S. programs on 234 channels in English and Spanish and more than 36,000 programs.
Obviously there are still flaws in this method, like if you don’t have a Twitter account or are not an active user. But the good news is that this is another way to calculate how many people are watching shows. Hopefully the shows we love will stop being canceled so early.
Back in December Nielsen announced its multi-year agreement with Twitter to create the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating system, on their website. This agreement is to “deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.”
Here are the Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings for the week of September 30, 2013:
| Rank | Program | Date | Network | Unique Audience | Impressions | Unique Authors | Tweets |
| 1 | Scandal | 10/3/13 | ABC | 3655.227 | 38434.402 | 178.508 | 712.877 |
| 2 | Miley: The Movement | 10/2/13 | MTV | 3185.221 | 13641.183 | 90.906 | 142.427 |
| 3 | Saturday Night Live | 10/5/13 | NBC | 3146.468 | 15700.444 | 101.932 | 175.773 |
| 4 | The Voice | 10/1/13 | NBC | 2619.769 | 5962.454 | 61.463 | 106.624 |
| 5 | The Voice | 9/30/13 | NBC | 2558.678 | 7441.91 | 75.674 | 134.968 |
| 6 | The Vampire Diaries | 10/3/13 | CW | 2488.369 | 9597.879 | 101.795 | 277.978 |
| 7 | Glee | 10/3/13 | FOX | 2270.082 | 7495.195 | 86.494 | 196.016 |
| 8 | Dancing With the Stars | 9/30/13 | ABC | 2092.856 | 6770.088 | 33.789 | 59.77 |
| 9 | The X Factor | 10/2/13 | FOX | 2038.964 | 9044.174 | 95.963 | 255.164 |
| 10 | The X Factor | 10/3/13 | FOX | 1802.45 | 6291.99 | 75.835 | 188.766 |
Primetime Addiction 