Audience measurement

[1] Networks blamed Nielsen for inaccurate rating measurements in the mid-2000s, and the company implemented its automated Local People Meter (LPM) technology.

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.

In a multisignal context, with new content in front of technological convergence, the correct representation of viewing behaviors faces methodological challenges.

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."

According to Anderson, people always wanted more choices but their desires were obscured by distribution bottlenecks imposed by cost or locality.

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.

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.

[10] 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).

[13] Sightcorp, TruMedia, Quividi, relEYEble, stickyPiXEL, Cognitec, goCount and CognoVision provide real-time audience data, including size, attention span and demographics, using video analytics to detect, track and classify viewers of digital displays.

Networked Insights measures online audiences, and released a report[14] ranking television shows by social-media interaction.

[19] Media research companies have been forced to devise new methodologies capable of tracking new and unprecedented viewing habits across a diverse range of different platforms.

Listeners complain that radio lacks variety and depth, but measurement methods facilitate further refinement of already-minutely-programmed formats rather than an overhaul.

Data obtained by some audience-measurement methods is detailed for individual songs and how they are reacted to by each age, racial, and economic group the station seeks to attract.

Four methods of data collection are used to survey broadcast audiences: interviews, diaries, meters, and scanning and modelling.