Do you know anyone with a Neilson tv data box?

I’ve thought that too. I don’t know anyone.

They don’t always give you a data box. Sometimes they give you a diary that you use to write down all the programs you watch over the course of a week. And sometimes they just call you. I have never been part of a Neilson rating, but I did fill out a diary for radio stations a few years back. It’s kind of neat. But I have never seen a data box.

I know that Tivo and sat TV companies keep metrics. They would have a skewed sampling of users though. I remember back during the superbowl with the wardrobe malfunction there was data published about how many time the clip was paused, rewound, watched etc…

In college I had friends who lived in a house that had one. They said it they tried harder to watch “good” shows because they knew it mattered. So: yes.

The Nielson ratings work along the same lines as a public opinion poll. They essentially choose a random sample of households, track the viewing habits of those households and then infer the viewing habits of the general public from the sample. It’s not surprising that you’ve never known someone with a Nielson box since these samples don’t need to be very large—public opinion polls tend to have only several hundred respondents. I would guess that, since Nielson reports out ratings for subgroups (by age and whatnot) that their samples are somewhat larger, but even then we’re only talking about several thousand households.

I did in 2005 and 2006, I did it for 2 yrs. It was pretty good. one household usually represent 1000 votes. In live in Tulsa, Oklahoma it’s in the Midwest kinda