Though most of our readers probably wouldn't have noticed the difference, we're sure a few of the regulars would, so we wanted to alert you to some site changes that have already been made or will be made in the near future.
First, and most importantly, somewhere in the fairly near future, we will be limiting our browsable archives of a lot of the regularly reported ratings data to two weeks of information. This change hasn't been made yet, but we've been working on a solution and whether it happens tomorrow or within the next 30 days, it will happen. This will extend to our browsable archives for pretty much anything where we use tabular or list data, including the daily overnight reports, the daily cable news reports and the weekly broadcast and cable top 20s.
We know this will make some people unhappy. Though we'd have preferred to have been able to archive everything for perpetuity, we do understand Nielsen's position on this. There are some Nielsen positions we don't really understand, but that's perhaps a story for another day.
We are also experiencing some issues with certain data that for the most part, even our hardcore faithful readers won't likely notice. However, until we get the issue with the archives resolved (which will likely be very soon) we are reluctant to approach Nielsen with any, "Hey, what happened to that data..." requests.
We currently lack the data to produce the top 20 shows by brodacast network that we had been posting, at least in the fashion we had been posting them. We could probably replicate it with a lot of hunting and pecking, but given the popularity of those posts and that it's summer, for now, we're just not publishing it.
As a result we have removed the links to the broadcast networks from our secondary site navigation and replaced those links with links to TV Show DVD sales (which we find very interesting) and the ratings and other press releases we get directly from the networks. Although there is of course always some spin-meistering in the prose of those posts, there are usually a lot of numbers too. We typically don't feed those posts into our RSS feed because often there are more than a dozen of them a day, but for the true ratings junkies, there is a lot of data in them.
We are sorry for any inconveniences these changes might cause anyone, but it beats not having any website at all! At least we think it does. We hope you will agree.
I understand their position, but I’m going to miss having the archives.
So they finally decided you were hurting business?
and you wonder why so many people are starting to sue them.
We need to host the archives in some obscure country that wouldn’t care.
Well thanks for the heads up.
Too bad Nielsen is being such a party pooper.
ON the bright side, I guess this site has reached the point where it’s getting in the crosshairs of Nielsen…that must mean something!
NOOOOOOO
Well, of course this website is hurting business! Why, I imagine that every Joe-station manager-Blow in Iowa rushes here every morning for the overnights.
Nielsen puzzles me. Always has.
ABCmedianet.com publishes the weekly numbers, but they seemed to have stopped doing that for the summer (little wonder – all of their series would be at the bottom of the list).
Oh no you didnt!
I’d say the use of the word “inspired” was…inspired
The big media corporations like Viacom and such were humiliated by the fact that some of their networks like VH1 Classics only averaged about 30,000 viewers in primetime and they did not want that information public. They corporations are ok with their top 20 networks and progams being made public because they have viewership in the millions but did not want the public to know that niche cable channels had virtually no viewers.
Methinks a lot of it has to do with Cartoon Network not letting people know how badly their ballyhooed CNReal lineup is doing, and using its “less than impressive” ratings to justify them changing their image and possibly their name in the future. Of course, kids aren’t stupid.
David / KaiZen: though I understand the thinking, we’re pretty certain we know the reasons for Nielsen’s motivation and it’s not coming from anyone at any of the networks. The truth is, we get much more data directly from networks (including Viacom owned networks and the Time Warner owned Cartoon Network) than we do directly from Nielsen.
If you want a conspiracy theory I’d go with blaming Marc Berman and James Hibberd complaining since they write for Nielsen-owned publications. It’s not true either, but it’s more plausible than the networks complaining and much more fun than the real reason!
Nielsen has been this way for a long, long time, so you’re absolutely correct Robert, it has nothing to do with certain networks. Even Berman has limits to what he can and can’t post, which is why he does a weekly top-30 list, but little beyond that.
Nielsen is protecting its intellectual property, which is understandable in a way. But in the same vein, it gets the vast majority of its revenue from the stations themselves (and they pay loads for it). The stations are not really interested in the numbers posted here – they’re far too general.
Thefutoncritic, about 10 years ago, used to be the go-to site for ratings (even though they only had households), but they too got a cease-and-desist from Nielsen around 5 (?) years ago and no longer archive anything.
I was curious, since you’ll be getting less information from nielsen, have you thought about getting the information that Tivo provides? i think it’d be pretty cool to see what shows are most DVR’d and which ads are the most skipped over, etc… do you know what i’m talking about when i say the information that TIVO has?
love the site though..miss the o’reilly v olberman chart tho:(
stephen
Doug, Nielsen seems to either not understand or not believe there is a lot of consumer (fans of shows based) demand for aggregate ratings data that can be presented with no risk of lost business to them. My memory might be off, but if I remember right when Bill and I were originally discussing the concept for this site, Bill couldn’t believe Nielsen didn’t do such a site itself. Neither one of us understand why they aren’t doing it now.
Strangely, Nielsen attempted to do a fan-based site that DIDN’T revolve around ratings. That site (Hey Nielsen!) failed. I’m sure they pissed away more money on that site than they would’ve by investing half of what they invested there on…us
@Stephen: The data TiVo makes regularly publicly available just isn’t very interesting (top season passes — doesn’t really have anything to do with viewing). While TiVo has too small a share of the DVR market to necessarily be representative of the national trends, the information they do have available, particularly through their StopWatch minute by minute tracking service is very interesting. There we could get a LOT of data for many interesting things (like how many people fast-forward through commercials, how many people listen to the opening theme songs, etc).
It’s definitely worth talking to them to see what they might be willing to provide, but TiVo’s data business is probably as prone to wanting to protect its intellectual property as Nielsen is ( and we know on the hardware/software patent-side, that is certainly the case) so I’m not sure how much interesting data would ever be made regularly available freely.
Well, for one thing, Nielsen sells its data to companies like Médiamétrie, who market them internationally. When there is a lot of data, which Médiamétrie pays Nielsen good money for, freely available on the internet, they get unhappy, because their clients are less likely to turn to them for the data. (I know I’ve been.)
So companies like Médiamétrie may even have a claim against Nielsen if Nielsen don’t take reasonable action to limit the content on sites like this.
Still sucks, though.
Are you planning to take down the articles themselves, or just remove the tables from the articles? It would be a shame if the discussions were deleted just because there’s a table in the article containing Nielsen data.
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Ray, a valid point and I will tell anyone who complains that it is “all Ray’s fault!”
I’m certain complaints from Médiamétrie weren’t the precipitating event, but it might have gotten to that sooner or later. While one such admission is one too many, I’m curious what data you were buying from Médiamétrie typically? Also it is interesting that it sounds like it might be easier to buy a la carte data from Nielsen resellers than it is from Nielsen itself.
Squiggleslash. I’m not sure of our implementation yet and it is too complex to explain all the issues. But, if it is possible to both satisfy Nielsen and not have to manually manipulate or delete outright thousands of posts, we will embrace such a possibility.
God Particle, exactly!
IMO, the extra information makes the site more interesting.I think the amount of hits will go down. How sad.
Robert and Bill – your site has been a fantastic resource and whatever site you can provide will be of fantastic use for fans and scholars alike.
It’s the same issue with MLB numbers – on an individual, daily basis, they are simply data points, but aggregated in the long term, they are analysis and “become” intellectual property.
I can sort of see Nielsen’s point – you give any competent web programmer a SQL database and a week or two, and he can construct a website that, if fed daily Nielsen numbers, would be able to chop the reporting in any way imaginable – new vs. repeats, normal showing vs. out of slot, by network, by genre, by producer, by distributor, etc. Sure, someone has to spend five minutes a day putting in the new data points/entering the one time specials – but that’s just about all the followup work you’d need to do.
Which of course would render all but Nielsen’s data collection irrelevant – and would mean they probably couldn’t turn a profit (or even break even).
So yes, it bothers me that a datum is free but a collection isn’t. But at the same time, the cost of aggregation/tabulation has gone way down over the last century (such that individuals do it with databases/spreadsheets/etc. on a daily basis), so the options are to either keep our hands off the net results (and their profits) or watch as the data collectors stop making the individual data points public.