Audience measurement

Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometimes, the term is used as pertaining to practices which help broadcasters and advertisers determine who is listening rather than just how many people are listening. In some parts of the world, the resulting relative numbers are referred to as audience share, while in other places the broader term market share is used. This broader meaning is also called audience research. Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometimes, the term is used as pertaining to practices which help broadcasters and advertisers determine who is listening rather than just how many people are listening. In some parts of the world, the resulting relative numbers are referred to as audience share, while in other places the broader term market share is used. This broader meaning is also called audience research. Measurements are broken down by media market, which for the most part corresponds to metropolitan areas, both large and small. The diary was one of the first methods of recording information. However, this is prone to mistakes and forgetfulness, as well as subjectivity. Data is also collected down to the level of listener opinion of individual songs, cross referenced against their age, race, and economic status in listening sessions sponsored by oldies and mix formatted stations. IBOPE was the first realtime service for audience measurement of the world, it started in São Paulo in 1942. The audience measurement of U.S. television has relied on sampling to obtain estimated audience sizes in which advertisers determine the value of such acquisitions. According to The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Amanda D. Lotz states that during the 1960s and 1970s, Nielsen introduced the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter, a device that daily sent viewing information to the company's computers using phone lines and made national daily ratings available by 1973. Although the audimeters did not supply sufficient information regarding demographics of the audience, it did allow Nielsen to establish diary reports that presented some insight on the audience. According to Lotz, the Nielsen sample included approximately 1,700 audimeter homes and a rotating panel of approximately 850 diary respondents. Nielsen was the controlling factor of audience measurement for national network television. In the mid-2000s, networks cried foul, blaming Nielsen for inaccurate rating measurements. This public attention was just the beginning, as Nielsen implemented its automated Local People Meter (LPM) technology. The LPM marked the shift from active, diary based local measurement to more passive, meter-monitored measurement of local markets. Technologically, the LPM is very similar to the original Nielsen People Meter. The key advancement was that the LPM provided accurate measurements of particular local markets. The LPM system has also allowed the industry to measure year-round, rather than the quarterly 'sweeps' periods. Researchers believed that the LPM more accurately reported the full range of programming viewers watched, including that while channel-surfing. Arbitron's Portable People Meter uses a microphone to pick up and record subaudible tones embedded in broadcasts by an encoder at each station or network. It has even been used to track in-store radio. The introduction of the digital terrestrial television (DTT) around the world brings new problems to the television audience measurement process. In a multisignal context, with the emergence of new contents and squarely in front of the contemporary technological convergence, the correct representation of the viewing behaviors faces methodological challenges. New methodologies (Audio or Video Matching, Water Marketing) are needed in order to measure the digital television audiences. The measurement using audimeters enters a new era, facing the dual challenge of analog and digital measurement in a mixed television broadcast. Because of the internet, many businesses are no longer constrained to establishing sales to just their local markets, but alternatively can serve customers across much larger territories. The arising development of markets boosts the likelihood of offering low-occurrence niche items that would go through challenges in order to encounter the ideal customers in a specific area of markets. In his Journal of Advertising Research, author Chris Anderson remarks: 'for some internet-based businesses, locality no longer regulates the market.'When consumers obtain access to a greater range of choices, they gravitate toward exercising those choices, awarding fewer of their 'votes' to the big hits and more of their 'votes' to specialized niche choices. Anderson argues that people always wanted more choices, but their desires previously were obscured by distributional bottlenecks imposed by cost or locality. New digital technologies initially complicated in-home measurement systems. The DVR, for example, initially seemed incompatible with a Nielsen box, which was designed to register the frequency of the television signal in order to measure the channel being viewed. As a DVR always produces the same frequency, an A/P or active/passive meter could be developed to read audio tracks of a particular program rather than the frequency of the television.Another challenge to the industry was consumers' turning to digital cable, the internet and devices other than their television sets to view entertainment content. As new ways of measurement were becoming readily available and people could easily be tracked and monitored for content and use, the industry worried that traditional sampling techniques might become obsolete. Furthermore, the increasing fragmentation of viewing across different technologies posed difficulties in reporting actual viewer numbers for a content piece. In 2010 Nielsen began rolling out its 'anytime anywhere media measurement' initiative, which includes DVR views in the television figures. Dubbed “GTAM,” which stands for Global Television Audience Metering, is based on the development of new audience metering technologies aimed at dealing with all of the conceivable challenges involved in measuring the video viewing behavior of contemporary consumer households across multiple platforms (TV, Internet, mobile devices). Existing A/P meters will be replaced by so-called GTAM meters which are expected to utilize a combination of active and passive measurement technologies. However, unlike A/P meters, they will not require a physical connection to any media devices to function. Nielsen//NetRatings measures Internet and digital media audiences through a telephone and Internet survey. Nielsen BuzzMetrics measures consumer-generated media. Other companies collecting information on internet usage include comScore, Wakoopa, and Hitwise, who measure hits on internet pages. Companies like Visible Measures focus on measuring specific types of media; in the case of Visible Measures, they measure online video consumption and distribution across all video advertising and content. GfK offers Cross Media Measurement Solutions that allows to attribute offline sales to media exposure across TV, Internet and Mobile utilizing its proprietary LEOtrace technology.