People Meters Catch On in N.Y. Market
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
For years, the technology behind Nielsen’s television rating system remained the same: viewers would enter their TV habits into a hand-written daily log.
Now, a new sophisticated way of recording that data, called People Meter, has gained widespread acceptance among networks and advertisers in New York as the benchmark for determining viewership and ad rates, Crain’s New York Business reported in today’s edition.
“People Meters are the future,” Marcia Cohen, a director at the ad agency Lowe New York, told Crain’s.
The new device, which resembles a remote control, automatically tracks a person’s viewing habits click-by-click.
In June, Nielsen installed the meters in 800 households in New York City, in spite of opposition from networks and lawmakers who said the new system underrepresented minorities.
In their first trial run, the devices showed that viewership for minority shows like UPN’s “The Parkers” had dropped by as much as 60%, a figure opponents said could scare off advertisers, drying up funding for minority programming.
Opponents also cited the meters’ failure to get accreditation from the Media Rating Council, an oversight agency that found technical problems with the devices.
Worse, the new rating system found that television viewership had declined across the board. According to self-reported viewing diaries, 3.8 million households watched TV on a typical Sunday night, whereas the new devices put that figure closer to 2.9 million, a drop of nearly a million households, Crain’s reported.
But data from the meters wasn’t all bad news. The local NBC affiliate in New York found that its morning news shows were more popular with viewers than it had previously thought, according to Crain’s.
New ad rates, negotiated under recent data collected from the meters, will not take effect until the fourth quarter early next year, because of a campaign finance law that freezes ad prices 60 days before the election, and due to the holiday shopping season during which advertising space is at a premium, Crain’s found.
