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Exactly how do television networks determine that they should run Who Wants to be a Millionaire five nights a week and cancel Freaks and Geeks? They need a way to know how many people tune in to their shows so that they can sell advertising and schedule sponsors. To find out how they do it, we began with a Yahoo! search on "TV ratings" that returned two category matches. The first one offered tips on how to interpret parental guidelines and safely install a V-Chip -- not what we had in mind. We went back and clicked on the category match for Nielsen ratings instead. Browsing through the sites in this category, we learned all about the top-rated shows of the past week, but found no mention of how the stats were determined. Then we saw a link that took us, in a couple of clicks, to the home page of Nielsen Media Research. We found our answer by clicking on the link in the sidebar called "What TV Ratings Really Mean." Nielsen, a pioneer in the field of media audience measurement, samples a cross-section of ab out 5,000 U.S. households to create the estimates the networks use. Nielsen installs special metering
equipment on the TV sets of a small set of participating households; this viewer data is transferred directly to Nielsen's computers. While a sample of 5,000 households may seem tiny for the purpose of calculating who's watching what, Nielsen's examples demonstrate a four-percent margin of error. Looking for more useful information on TV audience? Visit Nielsen's Ratings FAQ, which will give you a better understanding of the weekly numbers.
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