Audience measurement

Diaries The diary was one of the first methods of recording information. However, this is prone to mistakes, forgetfulness and subjectivity. Data is collected down to the level of listener opinion of individual songs cross-referenced against age, race, and economic status in listening sessions sponsored by oldies- and mix-formatted stations. IBOPE was the first real-time service for audience measurement in the world, beginning in São Paulo in 1942. Electronic The audience measurement of U.S. television has relied on sampling to obtain estimated audience sizes in which advertisers determine the value of such acquisitions. According to The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Amanda D. Lotz writes that during the 1960s and 1970s, Nielsen Media Research introduced the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter, a device that sent daily viewing information to the company's computers using phone lines and made national daily ratings available by 1973. Although the audimeters did not supply sufficient information about audience demographics, it allowed Nielsen to establish diary reports that presented insight into the audience. According to Lotz, the Nielsen sample included approximately 1,700 audimeter homes and a rotating panel of approximately 850 diary respondents. Nielsen was the controlling factor of audience measurement for national network television. Networks blamed Nielsen for inaccurate rating measurements in the mid-2000s, and the company implemented its automated Local People Meter (LPM) technology. The LPM marked the shift from active, diary-based local measurement to passive, meter-monitored measurement of local markets. Technologically, the LPM is similar to the original Nielsen People Meter; the key advance was that the LPM provided accurate measurements of local markets. The LPM system has allowed the industry to measure year-round, rather than the quarterly "sweeps" periods. Researchers believed that the LPM more accurately reported the full range of programming watched, including channel-surfing. Arbitron's Portable People Meter uses a microphone to pick up and record subaudible tones embedded in broadcasts by an encoder on each station or network, and has been used to track in-store radio. The introduction of digital terrestrial television (DTT) complicates audience measurement. In a multisignal context, with new content in front of technological convergence, the correct representation of viewing behaviors faces methodological challenges. New methodologies (audio or video matching, watermarking) are needed to measure digital television audiences. Measurement with audimeters faces the dual challenges of analog and digital measurement in a mixed television broadcast. Because of the Internet, many businesses can sell outside their local markets. This helps them offer niche items that would face challenges in finding customers in their specific market area. In the Journal of Advertising Research, Chris Anderson writes: "For some internet-based businesses, locality no longer regulates the market." Offered wider choices, consumers award fewer of their "votes" to the big hits and more to specialized niche choices. According to Anderson, people always wanted more choices but their desires were obscured by distribution bottlenecks imposed by cost or locality. New digital technology initially complicated in-home measurement systems. The DVR seemed incompatible with a Nielsen box, which was designed to measure the frequency of a television signal to ascertain the channel being viewed. Since a DVR always produces the same frequency, an active-passive (A/P) meter could be developed to read audio tracks of a particular program instead of the frequency of the television signal. Other challenges to the industry were digital cable, the Internet, and viewing devices other than televisions. As new ways of measurement became available and users could be monitored for content and use, concern arose that sampling techniques might become obsolete. The increasing fragmentation of viewing with different technologies posed difficulties in reporting viewer numbers for content. Nielsen began rolling out its "anytime anywhere media measurement" initiative in 2010, which includes DVR views in its television figures. GTAM (Global Television Audience Metering) is based on the development of audience-metering technology to deal with the challenges in measuring the viewing behavior of consumer households across several platforms (TV, Internet, mobile devices). A/P meters would be replaced by GTAM meters, which were expected to use a combination of active and passive measurement technologies. Unlike A/P meters, however, they would not require a physical connection to a media device. ==New media==