A Florida TV station is pissed, miffed, flabbergasted by their recent loss in advertising dollars and blames the whole scenario on Nielsen. See, Nielsen used to pay people to write down what they watched each evening but then they switched over to those fancy people meters and the Florida TV station’s ratings nosedived. So did American Idol’s. Now words like monopoly and lawsuit and percent are being thrown around and it’s all very serious.
Here’s some notable quotables.
“Suddenly, as of Oct. 1, of last year about 50 percent of the young audience, the young adult audience disappeared, vanished,” said the station’s owner, Ed Asnin, in a story published on it’s site WSVN.com.
“Frustrating and financially devastating. According to the lawsuit, Nielsen’s claim that half the audience quit watching, lowered the value of WSVN by $100 million, and the station’s ad revenue dropped dramatically.” — the story
“The Media Ratings Council, set up by the government to oversee companies like Nielsen refused to accrediate the ratings system in South Florida because it did not meet their minimum standards, but Nielsen put it in operation anyway because the lawsuit claims the company wanted to tap into the lucrative cable market.” — the story
“Right now, the people meters are being used in 21 of the nation’s 200 television markets. Critics of the devices say they do not accurately reflect young viewers, blacks and Hispanics, the perfect example came in South Florida with American Idol.” — the story
“Which is of course the leading show in the country, and American Idol overnight lost 50 percent of its audience. This is impossible. Suddenly we didn’t lose 50 percent of the audience, and nobody else in the country did. That doesn’t make any sense.” — Asnin
What do you think — did Nielsen kill this sector (and the 20 other markets where they switched to people meters) of the TV biz?
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More: “Nielsen Pays $1M To Lose Their Data”