Ratings Revolution
by Paul Miller
This weekend's edition of the NYT Magazine ran a long and fascinating article by Jon Gertner about something I'd never really thought about: TV ratings.
If you've ever wondered how they come up with those numbers for how many people watched a particular episode of Dr Who vs Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, this is the piece for you. Although admittedly I'm not sure whether similar methods are used in the UK.
What's interesting is how technology is creating new ways of measuring the ratings (which are ultimately all about advertising revenues) and how established and entrenched business models may be under threat from these new kids on the block.
The deeper message of the article is one of social and economic change as information about how we consume becomes more and more accurate. Maybe imperfect information was what left the consumer as king. As Gertner writes:
What we did in the evenings, what we bought, what we desired -- wasn't that always a riddle to be guessed at by advertisers and programmers? The window-shopper, the TV watcher, the radio listener, the Web surfer -- we were all so unpredictable, so capricious and terribly human. We were king because we were somehow mysterious. Who will wear the crown now?