Page 51 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Commercial knowledge: measuring the audience 39
transmission of television programming, currently assume about 85 per cent of the total
cost of the ratings services (ibid.). The eager use made of this information by media
managers has already been dramatically evoked in Beville’s opening scene. Other regular
users of ratings are advertising agencies and advertisers, the financers of commercial
television programming, and programme producers. Furthermore, ratings data have found
their way to trade journals and the popular press, where lists of top-rated programmes are
routinely published. For example, TV Guide magazine devotes considerable space to
ratings trends every week, presumably because readers find the information interesting.
The observation that The Cosby Show is ‘the number one show’, for instance, is a ratings’
construction. It is also through ratings data that we acquire a sense of objective and
generalizable certainty that prime time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty are more
popular among women than among men, although perhaps we already intuitively know
this by putting out our feelers in our own social environment.
Ratings are collections of statistics, numerical summaries of the outcome of the rule-
governed calculations involved in measuring the audience. In the American situation, two
features of the audience are the main objects of measurement: its size and its
composition. Size refers to the number of people tuned in to a certain programme or
channel at a certain hour on a certain evening; composition refers to the sorts of people
who are watching, defined in terms of demographic variables such as age, location,
income, and sex. Measurements are taken in relation both to the total potential audience
and to the actual audience at the moment of measurement. This leads to two essential
types of figures: ratings and shares. Technically speaking, a rating is defined as the
estimated percentage of all ‘television households’ (that is, households, usually families,
who are in possession of one or more television sets), or of all people within a
demographic group, within a certain survey area who view a specific programme or
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station. A share, on the other hand, expresses the percentage of all households having the
TV set on and tuned to a certain programme or channel at a particular time. Ratings and
shares are part of standard language in industry discourse: for example, Hill Street Blues
15.7/26 means a rating of 15.7 (i.e. 15.7 percent of all households with television are
tuned to the programme) and a share of 26 (i.e. 26 per cent of all households with a
television set activated are tuned in).
These figures can be obtained in several ways, but historically two major methods to
collect the basic data have been the most common until well into the 1980s: the diary and
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the setmeter. In the diary method, a sample of households is selected whose members are
requested to keep a (generally, weekly) diary of their viewing activities: when did who
watch which programmes on which channels? At the end of the week the diaries must be
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mailed to the ratings firm. They are then processed and put together in regularly
appearing reports on who has watched which programmes, the delivery of which takes
place several weeks after the end of the survey period. In the second case, an electronic
meter is attached to the television sets of a sample of households. The setmeter gives a
minute-by-minute automatic registration of the times that the television set is on or off,
and to which channel it is tuned. The data are transmitted to a home storage unit, where
they are stored until they are accessed by the central office computer during the night.
These data yield an enormous amount of information on gross audience size, of which the
national over-all Nielsen ratings for the three national networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC,