For those of you who live in nunneries or monasteries, I’ll help you out. PORN! Yes, PORN! What Nielsen will find out is which of the free porn sites is the most popular. Is it RedTube, Spankwire, YouPorn, XTube, or some other free porn site? Anyone care to take bets? Robert and Bill, care to set up a poll to see which we think will get the top rating nod?

Now seriously, because people watch most of their porn on their computers these days, how will Nielsen deal with that activity? Would it report on it? If it doesn’t, how doesn’t it? Will there be just a generic category of “adult entertainment” that Nielsen doesn’t break down any further? Or will it be like a prude and just not include those numbers at all?

And then think of how many people would actually opt-in for Nielsen monitoring their online porn activity. How would most handle it? Only let Nielsen put the software on the computer they know they’ll not be watching porn on? Demand a opt-out switch/button for when they don’t want Nielsen monitoring their internet activity (a.k.a. online porn activity)? I wonder how many will volunteer without thinking this all the way through but then come late at night and they’re wanting to watch that orgy video clip, they going, “Oh shit!” and then wondering how to turn off the damn Nielsen software. *LOL*

It doesn’t say how many people were actually watching a program: Was anyone actually in the room? Was the cable box simply left on while the TV was off?

It doesn’t tell you the demographic breakdown: That TV watching Spongebob, was it the parents or the kids watching?

It doesn’t tell you time-delayed info (unless built into the box, of course – but the demographic questions apply there as well): If the cable box was on for the Tivo to pick up, when was the show watched? Was it at all, or simply deleted for space a couple weeks later? Did they fast forward through commercials?

It doesn’t tell you what else was going on at the time: Were they typing away on Facebook or some computer game at the time?

All cable boxes tell you is that some number of households may have been receiving the signal at the time. That’s it.

Obviously, the ideal polling system would be some sort of glasses/hat/circlet/etc., that everyone in the house needs to wear at all times, that sends a signal to the monitoring box only when it has Line-of-Sight (also needs to somehow store movement/position data such that you can determine (and remove) when someone just leaves the circlet on a table, etc.)

The logistics, technology, and morality of such a system are all lacking. So Nielsen is frankly better than what we have, including raw cable box counts.

… and that’s how the New World Order begins…