TV ratings, explained

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

By the time you read this email, it’s entirely possible that the numbers will have been updated, but after the first two weeks of the college football season, it appears that Ohio State is the most watched team in college football. The number crunchers over at Nielsen track this all season, pulling ratings data from broadcasts on ABC, CBS, the CW, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, FOX, FS1, NBC, TNT and USA Network. As you’d probably expect, programs in the Big Ten and SEC dominate the list of most watched programs so far.

If you don’t work in advertising, broadcast media or college sports, you probably don’t need to track this stuff. But if you can measure it, you can argue about it online. Fans certainly like to brag about how important their favorite teams are, and the relative strength of the college football-watching TV audience is often used as a talking point in all sorts of debates surrounding college sports reform.

Which got me curious: How, exactly, do those numbers actually work? And if the methodology has changed, can you compare TV ratings from, say, 2018 to anything today? How apples-to-apples are we talking about?

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Nielsen has been monitoring radio audience data since the 1920s and television broadcasts since the 1950s. The company would randomly select a panel of viewers, meant to mirror the demographics of the country at large, and send them physical devices, called Audimeters, to attach to their TVs, which would track what programs they watched. Participants would also press buttons (to indicate which family members were watching which programs) and record diaries of what they’d watched.

Of course, the United States doesn’t look the same as it did in 1952 or 1982, and consumers access television in different formats now. Nielsen has had to change its methodology and technology to account for cable television, VCRs, pay-per-view and all sorts of other changes to the TV business.

They still use those panels today, although with different technology. And those aren’t the only way the Nielsens of the world track what folks are watching, and where. If you’re trying to extrapolate what any of this data means for the college sports business … it’s useful to know where the info really comes from today.