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PeopleMeter critics

Geoff Lealand, a former television audience researcher and now teaching and researching at Waikato University says

As a former TVNZ scheduler famously said 'Ratings are a myth we all believe in' - a rare admission that while so much money and so many egos depend on this method of constructing the New Zealand television audience, the myth persists. The statistical foundation of the PeopleMeter panel is open to question as it fails to represent the diversity of the Zealand viewers and, in respect to sub-populations, deeply flawed in that tiny numbers of viewers are assumed to represent large slices of the population....At the very least we should be thinking of other ways of talking about audiences (such as Appreciation indices, or other ways of measuring audience response to programming).

Excerpt from the letter of the week January 28, 2005, New Zealand Listener

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Ratings

How do television companies know how many are watching at any one time?

Television ratings are based on a sample of the television audience watching a television programme at any time.
Those who design the polling and ratings systems decide on a sample that will provide a 'good enough' result.

For political polls it is a number of voters that statisticians calculate can be reasonably generalized to the entire population voting. For audience companies it is a number of people with television sets that can be generalized to represent the whole population.

Clearly it is too expensive to be in touch with every New Zealander so there is a trade off between acceptable cost and accuracy. The statistically 'robust' sample is between 1000 and 2000 people. The accuracy margin is called 'the margin of error'.

In New Zealand ratings are produced by Nielsen Media Research, who are part of worldwide research company.

The low-down on the PeopleMeter

500 households representing 1250 potential viewers are included in the television PeopleMeter ratings.They claim to measure presence in the room where the television is on. Neilsen Media research doesn't just phone people to find out if they are tuned in to television, they use digital technology.

The technology consists of a

Monitor on top of the TV set - one per TV.
Remote handset - one per TV, each with a button for each person in the family.
Data storage unit with a modem - one per household.
Probe for SKY decoder measuring all channels coming through the decoder- one per decoder. Analog or digital. 'Smartprobe' for VCR - one per VCR, which measures the recording of programmes (not part of ratings).

The Monitor

The monitor on each TV automatically registers

Whether the TV is on.
Which channel the TV or VCR is tuned to.
Whether the VCR is on.
Which channel, if any, the VCR is recording.
Tuning through the SKY decoder.

Each person presses their own button to record their viewing.

They do this correctly about 90% of the time. The company does check up phone calls.
If the channel is changed that is also recorded.

Data delivery

Each night the information is fed down the phone line (via modem).
It is processed by computer overnight.
Data is delivered at 9.30pm 361 days a year.
Data is delivered to television companies, advertising agencies interested in value for dollar- for buying advertising space, and anyone else willing to pay for it.

The results are big business

If a programme 'rates' (gets high viewership from PeopleMeter homes) then the TV company can charge premium rates for advertisers wanting to buy time in it.
The statistics are most accurate for the big audiences in primetime. They warn that the statistics are not reliable for programmes with smaller audiences.
In fact TV companies tend to use ratings as a judgement for success for programmes where advertising is sold - even programmes like children's programmes.

More from the New Zealand Television Broadcasters' Council

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