I do think less people are watching than before. I don’t find it being the water cooler talk that it was a few seasons ago. And the show can be blamed for that since we know that it doesn’t matter who wins since 19 will give them all record deals and put them on tour. There is no exclusive prize to the winner of AI. What did Taylor Hicks get that Daughtry hasn’t also been given?

Most major industries know an independent accreditation body through which they must pass in order to sell their goods and services. Google ISO9001, TS16949 to learn more about quality standards. It seems Nielsen has often been able to ignore independent quality standards because it’s the “only game in town.”

http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/local/MI119585/

http://www.ncpp.org/?q=node/6#3.

Fascinating stuff, indeed. And consider that, using this standard rubric, Nielsen goes overkill–using 5,000 households instead of 1,200 for their national samples.

The year that Taylor Hicks won American Idol, there was a website, I think it was http://www.votefortheworst.com/, who boasted that their readers were “working” the Idol vote. I think they said that they were the ones who kept contestants like Sanjay and William Hung on Idol. And they claimed that they were responsible for getting Taylor Hicks voted the winner of American Idol. From what I read, they didn’t “watch” American Idol because they were fans of the show. Oh no. THey just voted for the person they thought was the absolute worst contestant just to see how long they could keep them on the air.

If that is true (and the multiple votes for individual Idol contestants is certainly true), I should think that the vote totals on Idol would be the least reliable indicator of viewership for the show. What’s “oxymoronic” is trying to say Idol’s vote totals equal viewership.

This certainly will be interesting to watch.

You are exactly right, with zero percent error in your statement. I find almost unbelievable that Nielsen has been allowed to exist for so long without providing error stats to their paying customers.

Seppy – I don’t think they are contesting Nielsen numbers b/c of decisions of to cancel or not. They are trying to get advertisers to pay more for a commercial spot on the #1 watched show. If the viewership is down, the advertisers could argue the price of the ad spot should go down too.

Either way the Nielsen ratings should report their numbers including a statistical error factor. I mean if they are basing the ratings for the whole country on a select few households participating, then there has to be an error factor, because there is no way their data is always correct.

“Do they prevent people from voting more than once from the same phone number?”

They do not.

If FOX is going to argue that if the number of votes is up but ratings are down – then convince advertisers to pay more for advertising based on those votes. You can vote as many times as you want from different locations. Do they prevent people from voting more than once from the same phone number? I dont think so, since I recall someone saying more people voted on Idol than voted for President. Even if they could prevent multiple voting from the same phone mumber, people could vote from cell and multiple land lines (home, work, friends house, relative house to juice the voting.

Anyway, that’s a very tiny piece of evidence with the “14 people in the home” factor. What would be REALLY cool is if FOX can show STB data for total viewership versus Nielsen count, and see some real discrepancies. I know, STB data has nothing to do with the demographics. But all it will take is the right combination of statistics-plus-really-good-sales-staff to convince advertisers that the holy grail of youth demos is far less important to actual buying power than previously figured. Right now, targeting the 18-49 demo is “inside the box” thinking. Someone, somewhere, is going to start thinking outside the box very soon .

Ultimately, I think Nielsen could use serious improvement, but by doing this the ratings may suspiciously plummet for them. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!

And I sure hope there’s more to CKX’s arguments than that.
“There are two options: between a smaller, more engaged audience, and a larger, statically engaged audience. With our demo consisting of an ever more younger, internet-using, interconnected audience that is more likely to vote, the answer is obviously the latter.”

Err, what?