Posts tagged Ratings
Time for Television Ratings to Get Social
Nov 8th
The start of the current fall television season has highlighted the importance of social media in driving awareness and tune-in for new and established TV series as audience consumption habits continue to fragment across device and social platforms.
With multiple apps being promoted by shows, networks and even TV service providers for checking-in to these broadcasts as well as fan pages and hashtags used to centralize the conversation around each episode, there is a growing need for audience measurement beyond the traditional Nielsen ratings.
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Alex Calic has spent the past 10 years in management roles at 3 internet start-ups covering the intersection of adtech, ecommerce, mobile, social and video. He currently serves as the Chief Revenue Officer of The Media Trust, a client-side monitoring and verification service to hundreds of clients across the advertising ecosystem. You can follow his thoughts online @alexcalic on Twitter and his personal blog alexcalic.com.
The Nielsen Company is the de facto provider of the ratings system used to determine how the 60 billion in television advertising dollars are allocated amongst broadcast and cable network line-ups. The company relies on the behavior of 50,000 Americans across its sample of 25,000 households to extrapolate ratings for the nearly 115 million households with television sets in the U.S. The resulting ‘share’ of audience Nielsen attributes to each TV episode on a nightly basis ultimately effects which series get renewed or cancelled (for a great primer on how Nielsen’s TV ratings system works, check out this ESPN-style animated video on the topic from local Washington, DC creative agency JESS3).
Though with the number of households with television sets dropping for the first time in 20 years, on-demand video platforms taking viewing time away from traditional television and multi-tasking across multiple screens a growing reality, traditional means of measurement are failing to capture this evolving consumer behavior.
While Nielsen is working on ways to aggregate this distributed viewing audience through its “extended screen” initiative, the company isn’t measuring the actual activity on the social web occurring around the episodes being watched. This represents an opportunity for services that provide a platform for social engagement as well as companies that aggregate TV show-related conversations from across the Internet to address this information gap. While both Facebook and Twitter have their own media-related initiatives that allow fans to interact with one another as well as with the shows and their stars, neither network focuses on quantifying this engagement on an industry-wide basis.
Services like BuddyTV, GetGlue, Miso and Tunerfish, on the other hand, have been built in a manner that can address this need. Having ridden the check-in wave popularized by location-based service Foursquare, these event-based social networks (EBSNs) capture when consumers are tuning in to watch television and aggregating the activity being generated around each show within their respective apps and websites. GetGlue, the largest of these services, already has more users checking-in to the most popular shows on its platform than the size of Nielsen’s entire sample audience, making it statistically valuable to the ratings conversation.
Even though the demographic make-up of EBSN users is not representative of the overall U.S. population (which Nielsen does try to mirror in selecting its households), check-in services make up for this by highlighting the actual activity of the most desirable audience to advertisers (18 to 49 year-olds) and not just projections. For advertisers this represents a unique opportunity to target these consumers in a highly engaged environment by extending their TV advertising for particular shows to the equivalent social web channels and mobile devices. To bring the desired scale to this type of opportunity though, these social environments need to be aggregated somehow.
That’s where companies like Bluefin Labs, General Sentiment, Social Guide and Trendrr come into play by not only aggregating publicly available social commentary but filtering and normalizing this data from disparate sources (EBSNs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to identify the underlying sentiment of a broader range of web users. This provides a more complete view of the engagement associated with shows across the social web in real-time as well as beyond the initial airing time slot of each episode. The resulting findings might be just the data set necessary to become the de facto social television rating to rival Nielsen.
Even with Nielsen’s recent ratings calculation glitch, it’s unlikely that the company will be replaced as the ratings system for the television advertisers industry in the near future. But as audiences for traditional TV continue to disperse across more mediums and content experiences, the need to compliment the ratings discussion, and ultimately how advertising dollars are allocated, with additional data will only continue to increase. This creates an opportunity for actual engagement-related metrics to gain equal footing with passive stream and tune-in projections over time.
So how do we get there?
While results from a recent Nielsen study confirm the correlation between social activity and TV ratings, the opportunity for social television start-ups is in identifying and explaining the variations in popularity between Nielsen’s most highly rated shows and those series being discussed online and how to benefit from it.
The combination of tune-in and conversation activity make EBSNs the most compelling data set for social television ratings. The challenge is that the company that popularized the check-in, Foursquare, only recently passed 10 million users worldwide itself, a far cry from Facebook’s 150 million users in the U.S. alone.
Next page: For EBSNs to reach Facebook-like adoption, they need distribution
It’s Not Just Chatter: TV Shows With Social Media Buzz Have Higher Ratings
Oct 7th
Television shows that are widely discussed on social networks like Facebook and Twitter also have a tendency to have higher ratings than other shows, new data from Nielsen reveals.
The fact that people tweet about TV shows and chat about them on Facebook and Google Plus is hardly breaking news, but this is among the first hard data that demonstrates a correlation between that social chatter and actual, real-world viewership. This is especially true among younger viewers, Nielsen points out.
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You might think, well sure, of course TV shows that people see more get talked about more. But this data doesn’t pertain exclusively to discussions that go on while a show is airing; Much of the chatter happens prior to the show’s air date, and that chatter can help predict the show’s actual success. Four weeks before a show begins, a 9% increase in social media buzz translates into a 1% increase in ratings.
As the season goes on, the correlation gets weaker, but it still exists. By mid-season, it takes a 14% increase in social buzz to correlate with a 1% increase in ratings. The same is true of the season finale of the show.
The role of social media in the television-viewing has been growing over the last few years. Even if an overwhelming number of people are not yet using social entertainment check-in apps like GetGlue, they’re certainly posting to Twitter and Facebook as they watch. This trend has grown as tablets and smartphones have found their way onto the couch and viewers use so-called second screen apps to complement the television watching experience.
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Google Gets Into Ratings Game With Trusted Stores
Oct 3rd
Google is launching an e-commerce certification program this morning called “Trusted Stores.” The company says that it’s trying to give consumers greater confidence to buy products online. In very limited beta right now, qualifying e-commerce stores will be able to display a…
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Google Buys Zagat Ratings, Rocks Local
Sep 8th
Google is buying the venerable Zagat survey, which is the original local reviews provider and has been in business for more than 30 years. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Rumor had it that Zagat has been “on the block” informally for some time as the company increasingly…
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Google Tweaks Android Market Ratings System
Jun 27th
Google recently made a slight change to its Android Market ratings system for the Web, which brings it more in line with competitors like Apple and Amazon. Now, users browsing for apps from a PC Web browser will see more how many people have given an app a particular star rating, as opposed to just an average of all the ratings an app has received.
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This is a minor change, to be sure, but an important one for mobile application developers to take note of, as it will now provide potential customers a better, more in-depth look at an app’s user reviews.
Unfortunately, Google has stopped short of a complete ratings makeover with this update, and does not provide a way for a user to jump straight to all the reviews of a particular rating – for example, all the 1-star reviews.
In addition, the new system doesn’t offer to filter reviews by application version, a feature whose absence almost seems unfair, considering that Google has practically designed the Market to be a testing ground for iterative app updates. Because apps don’t have to go through a review process at Google, developers can quickly update their applications to address bugs users complain about in the reviews section. However, it’s hard for potential new users to know if and when those bugs are fixed just by reading the reviews.
This recent change to the ratings system has only made it the Web Market so far, but we expect it (or something similar) will arrive on the smartphone’s Market soon.
Via: AndroidCentral
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Google Maps 5.5 Adds Check-Ins, Ratings, and Improved Transit
May 29th
There was once a time when Google Maps was only a small footnote being flicked aside by MapQuest. Now the picture has changed immensely, and largely thanks to mobile application support from Android and iOS devices, Google Maps is a dominant player. Of course, there’s more to it than Google’s cross-promotion. Maps has also been adding features like a training sumo wrestler adds pounds: quickly and visibly. The most recent set of additions, being rolled out now with Maps for Android version 5.5, include check-ins, ratings, and an improved public transit system.
Here’s a brief breakdown of the included features:
- Check-in. Whenever you load a location, you’ll now have the option to check in with Google Latitude, the geo-location tool. Registering with Latitude, changing your personal information (such as home and work address) for Latitude reports, and other Latitude features are also easier to access in Maps 5.5.
- Rate. You can now quickly give a star rating for the Google Place page of the location you’ve looked up. You can also visit the other rating or write a full Places review.
- Improved transit information. Get a report of nearby public transit locations, where they’re departing to, what times you can expert departures on different routes, and more. While Google transit information is enabled for over 440 cities, this feature is not yet implemented in all of them.
To check out Android Maps 5.5, simply load up the Android Market from your smartphone or tablet and update your version of the app. If you didn’t have the app installed (or uninstalled it) you can do a simple search for Google Maps to make a fresh download of the most recent version.
[via the Google LatLong Blog]
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Google Maps 5.5 Adds Check-Ins, Ratings, and Improved Transit
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Android Apps to Get Content Ratings
Nov 24th
The Android Market can be a frustrating place to find applications. And according to a blog post today, Google says that giving users more information about apps as they browse the Market has been “a top request” from Android users.
So in the spirit of giving good information (and not at all to combat ideas that Android is full of porn, I’m sure), Google will be adding content ratings to Android apps..
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The policy won’t be changing in terms of what content is allowed in the Android Market. But in coming weeks, all applications will be rated based on whether they fall into the All, Pre-Teen, Teen, or Mature categories. These categories are based on whether or not apps contain profanity, sexual content, and violence, for example. Developers are responsible for rating their apps themselves, although users will be able to flag apps that may be rated incorrectly.
In preparation for the new ratings, starting next week, developers submitting new or updated applications will be required to provide a rating when they upload their apps to the Market. And by the time that all the ratings are visible to the public, all applications and games will have to be rated, otherwise they’ll be automatically tagged as “Mature.”
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Avvo Expands Into Doctor Search & Ratings
Nov 1st
Avvo, the popular lawyers’ directory, is expanding into the medical industry today with a new directory of US-based doctors. The company says its new services launches with profiles of more than 800,000 doctors, as well as a forum where consumers can trade questions and answers with participating doctors.
The most noteworthy — and possibly controversial — [...]
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