Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How TV Ratings Work

Episode Date: June 1, 2019

Ever wonder why some great shows go off the air after a season or less? Blame it on the Nielsen company, which has for more than 60 years been the almost exclusive decider of what goes and what stays on TV. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, happy Saturday. It's Chuck here with another Stuff You Should Know Select. This week, everyone, I picked out an episode about TV ratings because, I don't know, I love TV, and it's interesting.

This is from September, 2014, and I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant, and there's Jerry W. Jerry Rowland.

Actually, Jerry's been canceled. Oh, okay. Due to low ratings. You know, what's funny is Jerry has been portrayed on television. In a TV show that was canceled due to poor ratings. Poor ratings. That was our show.

That was our show. We had a television show once. It was called Stuff You Should Know. It was a slightly fictionalized version of our life, our work life. We made a sitcom. Yeah, we did. It's pretty cool.

And a lot of people loved it, and a lot of people were like, what in the world did you do it that way for? So that a lot, it's like basically 10 and 10. Oh, yeah. You're referring to the 20 people who've seen that show. Yeah, actually, we'll get to that all, but we know a little bit about how TV ratings work because of that.

And in some ways, I believe we're a victim of the antiquated system that is the Nielsen TV ratings. Yeah, okay. No, dude, it's antiquated, that's why it's changing. I do not disagree with the antiquated part. What I do disagree with is that had it been up to date, I think it would have had zero impact on our success. I don't know, man.

I will say this to the people out there. What the network did was they looked only at one number, which is the amount of people that sat down in front of their television set on a Saturday night live at 10 p.m. to watch our show. Right. They did not count things that we'll talk about, like online streaming or DVR or anything like that,

which is what makes it antiquated because it's changing, man. People aren't watching TV like they used to, but they're basing a lot of these decisions on a system that was designed in the 1950s. So let's go back, man. It goes back even further than that. Back in 1923, the A.C. Nielsen Company started,

at the time, people who were broadcasting radio wanted to know what people were listening to. So there were a lot of companies that would telephone up a family at random and say, say, fella, what are you listening to right now on the old Victorola? Ah, the Amazing Adventure Hour. And he'd say, hey, thanks a lot, bub.

Talk to you later. And they'd hang up. It's a nickel for your troubles. They wish, because we're talking depression at this time. Well, not 1923. Later on, they wished they had a nickel. Here's a chicken for your pot. Nice.

That's a Hoover reference, man. You don't get those too often. I try to bust them out. So the Nielsen Company said, that's all fine and good. That's great that you guys are figuring out what people are listening to, but we have something even better, because we are a technological powerhouse.

And what they did was they randomly picked some families around America and said, say, can we put this cool recording device in your home, near your radio, and it will record what you're listening to at any given time, and then we'll send technicians out to pick it up from time to time, get the information off of it,

and then bring it back so we can keep recording it. And family said, sure. And the Nielsen Company's domination of broadcast ratings was sealed. After that point, everybody from every competitor they had was just peanuts compared to the Nielsen Company, so much so that when you hear TV ratings, it's synonymous with Nielsen ratings.

Very much like Kleenex and facial tissue are one and the same. Same thing, thanks to Nielsen's technological powerhouse. The irony of it, though, is that once they started installing those boxes in the 20s or 30s and then they moved on to television sets, the innovation, I mean, they innovated somewhat, but fundamentally, principally, it remained the same until a year or two ago.

Yeah, and they're not, we'll get into all the hardware of the hardware side of how it works, but what they did in 1954 was send actual little diaries that you would fill out and pencil and send back, and they still do that today. In 2014, even though in 2006, they said they were gonna stop, they still send those little diaries

and you get a little diary in the mail with five $1 bills in the envelope for your troubles. That's funny, so it's like the modern nickel. Yeah, exactly, and they rely on lazy, dishonest people to fill out this card and mail it back and then go spend that $5 on a grande latte. Yeah. Would've gotten you a lot more in 1954.

Oh, man, you could've bought a car. But that is the diary version. And the networks and advertisers have never liked the diary version, they still don't. No, but it's what's called Sweeps Week, which is hard to say. That's right, and we'll get to Sweeps in a second, but what they mainly like to rely on

are two different electronic hardware methods, the set meters, as in TV set, and people meters. And right now they have, by 2015, they plan to have more than 6,200 TV set meters, and this is just for the US and Canada, by the way, because everyone else's TV is weird. Yeah. Simon.

You ever watch TV in different countries when you're traveling and stuff? Yes, and it is. It's so much fun. It is fun, but after a while, you're like, I really miss American TV. Yeah, but I mean, if you're traveling abroad, you shouldn't be watching a whole lot of TV.

Exactly. It's like late night in the hotel. But it's one of the great pluses, is you're just like, I don't feel like watching this. I'll go out and see the sights instead. Yeah, I think I was in Belgium watching TV with my buddy Brett years and years ago, and it was translated in English in subtitles,

and one of the characters said something, and I guess, I don't know if it was Flemish, and the other guy just looked and said, ickook, and it said, me too. So we still say that today when we're responding me too to each other, we'll go ickook. Nice. All those years later.

So anyway, the set, yeah, I said there were 6,200 by 2015 in 31 markets, TV markets. And then there are about 35,000, I believe now, people meters in those homes, oh, I'm sorry, in about 20,000 homes. And those people meters are more specific because you can have three people meters in one house. We want to see what little Susie's watching.

We want to see what her brother Randy's watching. And they won't see what her dad watches after everyone's gone to bed. So each one of them will have their own little people meter that they'll turn on. And I always thought that these things were connected to your television, like your cable box. And it just kind of read the information,

but they're actually listening devices. Isn't that weird? Totally blew my mind. So basically, the way that Nielsen figures out what TV show you're talking to is because they have a device that's connected to the internet that is eavesdropping on your TV. And just in 2006, finally got to the point

where they perfected this technology. And they have codes that broadcasters, the networks and the local affiliates, have to put in to their audio stream, the audio video stream. Not just the audio stream. Is it just audio? Yeah, but they're trying to come up with a video version. So basically, there's a sound, there's a frequency

that you can't hear. I don't even think your dog can hear it. But it comes through your TV, and your Nielsen box can hear it. And it's basically an audio fingerprint for a show. And when the Nielsen box hears that audio, it can be like, oh, well, they're watching Good Times right now.

That's funny, I was just thinking that. No way. Good Times, yeah. And then I was like, no, I should say Three's Company instead. It depends. And then you said Good Times. Although if you watch Good Times long enough, there's an episode of Three's Company coming on eventually

on that channel. I think Good Times may be my favorite all-time theme song. That's a good one. Oh, man, it's so good. It's ridiculous. Did I tell you Henry Mancini did the what's happened in theme song? Yes.

What episode was that in? Just a few ago. Oh, it was Number Stations. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the sound that the shortwave thing made. So that's how Nielsen's been figuring out what people are watching, which is mind-blowing. It's also, if it seems a little backwards, yeah,

it may be emblematic of a larger systematic resistance toward technological improvement. Yeah. Or if it seems a little small as far as the sample pool goes. Which it is. It is. But what they do is they extrapolate that number, just like pollsters do.

And they say, well, these are average markets. These are average families. So if these, eventually 6,200 TV sets are watching this, we can pull that out and do some sort of, they probably do it on a chalkboard in a room. There's this one guy who has the piece of chalk. And he extrapolates sets out and says, well, this is what America is watching, which always has

bugged me. Yeah. Especially when you have a TV show that gets canceled. It is, because it all comes down to just how representative is your sample. You said there's 6,500 TV sets. There's 6,200 by 2015 for the set meters. Right now in 2014, May of 2014, there are 116.3 million TV

sets in the US. Exactly. So this is a very small sample size. But if the guy with the chalk, Bert, can come up with a very good representative portion of the US, like there's this many divorced Hispanic families. There's this many gay Asian households. There's this many Mitt Romney voters.

And they take all these guys and put them together. And it's a clear cross-section of America. That's America, baby. You should be able to extrapolate pretty well from that. That's true. It just all depends on how good their statisticians are. That's right. And they do audits over the years and quality checks,

of course, and compare ratings from different samples. So it's not like they just said, yeah, that's how we're doing it, although they sort of do that. But they do quality checks, of course. Yeah. One of the problems is there's been so few challenges from outside competition that Nielsen can do whatever it wants. And it's so powerful that it literally

has the entire television industry at its feet. It decides what rating a TV show gets, and ultimately, the whole point to all of this stuff, to TV ratings in general, is so that networks and their local affiliates can set advertising rates for advertisers. There's $78 billion at stake. That's the advertising spent in a year on television.

And it all comes down to what rating Nielsen, with their representative sample and their audio eavesdropping boxes, and their $5 bills in a paper diary, decide that your TV show got. That's right. The dirty little secret is that they don't care how many people are watching that TV show. They care about how many people are watching the commercials.

That's really what they're looking at. And more specifically, what demographic, which is why I don't think we mentioned why the people meters are so valuable because they want to get that specific demo so they can show advertisers 18 to 49-year-olds. They spend a ton of money, and they're watching community. But no one else is, so we'll cancel community. Which is kind of crazy, as we'll see in a little while.

Yeah, but just quickly, let me go over. I think most people know this, but if you've got a half-hour TV show, and you're going to have 22 minutes of TV show, then you're going to have eight minutes of commercials. Six of those are national ads sold by the network, and then your local affiliate, that's where you're going to get your awesome commercials.

Hey, as for the wolf man. Yeah, two minutes worth. Or Crazy Eddie, I remember, was big up in the Northeast. And then, so this is 2006. I couldn't find one recently. But back in 2006, if you were buying a commercial slot from a local affiliate, you're going to pay about $100 to $2,000, depending on,

and this is during the daytime. This isn't like 3 AM, depending on what show. So like back when Oprah was on, you could get a 30-second spot for $90. Oh, it's a local affiliate? Yeah, you could also pay up to $2,000 for it. And then, apparently, you're going to double that for a national ad for a 30-second spot during the day,

which is not outlandish. Well, that's how Crazy Eddie, I mean, or the wolf man, they don't have a ton of money. No. Although, I don't know, a wolf man wore a lot of jewelry. Yeah, that's true. For those of you who don't know who the wolf man is, we understand, because you probably didn't live in Atlanta

in 1990. Yeah, I bet it was Southeast. I bet it was on WTBS and stuff. All you have to do is go type in wolf man, Donna, gallery furniture into the YouTubes, and it will show you some classic gallery furniture ads. Or just type in, hey, ask for the wolf man. No, ask for Donna.

I don't remember that part. What? You don't remember Donna, his daughter with the hair? The whole premise of the ads was wolf man, wanted you to come see him. And she'd say, hey, ask for the wolf man. And she'd go, no, ask for Donna. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, sweeps, everyone's heard it. It is a bit. Everyone's heard it? Yeah, everyone hears about, you know, this is Sweeps Weeks. That's when, well, we'll tell you what it is. This is the fact of the podcast to me.

What, Sweeps Week? Yeah, where it came from, and why it exists. Well, in 1954 is when they started sending out those TV diaries, and they made a geographic sweep, starting in the northeast, across the country, from east to west, and they collected the little booklets, and those were our first reportings of TV ratings. So before, they had the eavesdropping boxes

that they were using, but it was basically like this, these are, I think, maybe up to 20,000 households at one point in the major markets. The great thing about the paper diaries is they could go into local markets, smaller markets, and find out not just what the people in New York, or LA, or Chicago were watching, but what the people in Santa Fe were watching, too, or Fort Lauderdale.

Yeah, there was a saying. How does it play in Santa Fe? Was it Sheboygan or something? Probably Sheboygan, or Walla Walla. I can't remember. It may have been a movie thing, too, but there's an industry saying, how does it play in this city? It's got a rhyme.

Because that's what matters. Of course, New York and LA and the major markets are going to consume. They want to know what your average household wants to see. Right, and this is in 1954. This was the first time that anyone had ever taken a really comprehensive snapshot of what America was watching in the given week.

And so they said, hey, this worked really well. We're going to start doing this every year. We're going to have what's now called a sweeps week. And it's going to be on this week. And so the TV executive said, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Sweeps week, this is what we're going to start setting our advertising rates against. And it's going to be this week?

And I'm going to do the craziest stuff I can think of to get ratings as big and wide as I possibly can grab on that week. And that is where Sweeps Week came from. And we've seen some pretty interesting things as a result of Sweeps Week. Yeah, there's a great tradition of stunt casting during Sweeps Week.

Justin Bieber will show up on CSI. I didn't see that one, did you? No, I don't watch that show. And if I did, I would have punched my TV if he showed up on it. If you're going to shoot JR, you're going to do it during Sweeps Week. The late night talk shows are going

to load up their biggest A-list guest during Sweeps Week. ER did a live show. Yes, I actually watched that one. And I wasn't an ER fan. I just wanted to see if they could pull it off. It was pretty cool. Ellen used to have a sitcom based on her life. And she came out on that show during Sweeps Week.

Oh, yeah, that's right. And very famously, there was a not one, not two, but thrice part happy days where Fonzie jumps a shark on water skis. Was that Sweeps? That happened during Sweeps Week. Wow, that's a Sweeps failure. Well, I don't know if people watched it.

Yeah. I don't guess you can call it a failure, because that's probably a hook on it. Yeah, it's part of the lexicon now. Do you remember in Arrested Development where Henry Winkler jumps over a shark? Yeah, classic. These days, Sweeps Week is actually 16 weeks

because they have, I don't know about, narrowed it down. They broadened it out to four, four week periods in November, February, May, and July. And they still trot out special things for Sweeps, but it definitely doesn't have the teeth that it used to because of the way that people consume media these days, which we're going to start getting into.

So it doesn't have the teeth that it used to. And as a result, a lot of networks have kind of stopped, like you said, doing the stunt casting and that kind of stuff. But it's still basically holding broadcast TV hostage because that is still what advertisers want to see. Well, what are your ratings during Sweeps Week? And that's what they set their ad rates against.

So the fact that there are these four month-long Sweeps weeks means that the broadcasters have to follow the normal fall-to-summer broadcast model with reruns in between. Yeah, and this is for NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, like the major broadcast networks, non-cable networks, which is a completely dying beast. Yeah, because they rely 100% exclusively on advertising.

And cable has been eating their lunch because advertising has been going down. It looks like it's already peaked. It's still $78 million. Billion. Billion, yes, you're right. But cable takes a huge substantial portion of that in advertising.

But then even when advertising rates go down, cable still survives because cable makes money off of subscriber fees and transmission fees, too. Yeah, exactly, which is why cable has a big leg up. And also, they don't have the traditional television season. They can release stuff all year long. You can binge watch it?

Yeah, which is happening. That's the new model. So like we said, for many years, Nielsen was just kind of, as this one wired article, the Nielsen family is dead, put it. It was in a torpor. And the first thing that really I do, too. Torpor.

It's so great. The first thing that really roused Nielsen was DVRs. Because when DVRs came along, the advertising industry was like, oh, god, people can fast forward through ads now? Yeah, like they've always dreamed of doing? Exactly, now they can. And it was basically the television apocalypse. And that didn't pan out, because advertisers figured out

that, yeah, people can fast forward through ads. But there's ways to still get your message across. It's 16 times speed. You can do things called pop busters, where you use the actors or the look or the set of the TV show that you're advertising within to make them think like the show just came back on, and you caught them. Because it's really an ad.

I know. There's all sorts of stuff you can do. So it hasn't been an advertising apocalypse. And as a result, because DVRs are clearly here to stay and have been since the early 2000s, Nielsen has had to finally be like, OK, we need to innovate a little bit and figure out how to include DVR.

Because not everybody's sitting down at 8 o'clock on a Monday night and watching murder she wrote. Nobody is. Man, I watched a couple episodes the other night. I love that show. I've never seen one episode. What? I know.

Man, it is good. Is it? It's good. Another thing, too, just to backtrack, is I've noticed lately is you're on-demand watching, which a lot of cable companies. I'm a Comcast person because I'm forced to be. Yeah.

Yeah, really? A lot of the on-demand shows now, within the first couple of weeks that they're available, you can't fast forward through. Oh, yeah, I can see that. Like, you hit the fast forward button and a little null sign comes up and says, sorry, you're going to have to sit through this.

So the DVR, I guess, the fact that the DVR is connected to the internet and is because it's getting show information, the actual show is being recorded on your physical hard drive. I'm sure there's cloud DVR recorders or whatever, but for the most part, there's a hard drive that's recording shows onto your DVR. And then the other capability is that it's connected

to the internet, which is where it gets show information and all that stuff to present to you. Exactly. But the internet, as you may have figured out by now, is a two-way street. Not only can information be downloaded to your home, it can be uploaded. And that includes your preferences,

how what shows you watch, how often you watch them, when you watch them. And so all of a sudden, the DVR companies are like, hey, Nielsen's giving you guys like 8 PM on NBC ratings. We've got all of these other ratings that they're not taking into account that you can get from us. Not only that, but they can actually

tell when you're pausing your TV, because the infamous Nip Slip, I hate even saying those words. Yeah, really? And the 2004 Super Bowl with Janet Jackson, they Tivo, the popular DVR company. Although, do people still use Tivo? They probably do. I don't know.

It's like every local cable company has their own DVR now. It seems like it. But they were able to say that was the most replayed clip in the history of Tivo up until that point was people pausing and rewinding that stupid, stupid stunt. But like you were saying, they've now decided, at least some networks have decided they're going to start counting what's called the DVR, I'm so bitter,

the DVR plus system, which is DVR live plus same day. Yeah, that's the Nielsen method. Live plus three days, or live plus three, and then live plus seven, which is obviously live plus same days if you just watch it later that night. Plus three is three days, within three days, and then seven is within that week. And I'm seeing like conflicting information out there.

It seems like either they now have basically just live plus three, which is like their main measurement. Well, what matters is what the advertisers say is what we care about. Like you can have live plus 20, but if the advertisers are like, we don't care about live plus 20, that doesn't do anything for us. Exactly, it's true.

But it sounds like you're right. Like at one point, they tried to say that live plus same day is basically the same thing Nielsen did. And they wanted to lump it together with live, and the advertisers were like, no, it's really not the same. No, because of the fast forwarding thing. Yeah, so let's at least separate these numbers out so we can look at it all individually.

Yeah. The thing is, the people who are watching TV, IEU and I, we don't care what the advertisers think. And they basically just need to keep up with our viewing habits, which are changing radically. The broadcast networks have lost 17% of the most coveted demographic, 18 to 49 year olds, between 2012 and 2013.

17% just gone. Part of that is because the networks put out terrible, terrible stuff, although sort of the cable networks these days too. Yeah, sure. But another part of it is because broadcast is stuck in this sweep weeks, sweep week, certain time on a certain day format that it's been in forever

since the 50s. And they're being basically held hostage by Nielsen's ratings. So there's been a real push to advance technologically and to start taking into account these other myriad ways that people consume television and getting a clear picture of what an audience is doing. And the fact that it's now computer-based and we have ways of tracking computers,

really broadcasters are as excited as ever. And we just have to figure out how to do it. And we'll talk about how they're trying to figure out it right after this. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Stuff You Shouldn't Know"] Well, one thing before we get to the internet that we haven't mentioned yet is you might hear in TV parlance the word share, as opposed to rating. And what that is, is a share is how many people are watching a certain TV show that are actually watching TV. A rating is just how many people are watching it.

But the share is how many people, what share of people are watching a show that are watching something. Other people, like if your TV's off, it doesn't count. No, then you. So your share number is always going to be higher. Yeah, it is. But the rating is the number of people watching it

compared to the entire population of America, right? Exactly. Or Canada. Yeah, I keep forgetting about Canada. They steal our shows. So now we're on to the newest development. DVR's kind of through a wrench in the plans, but they're trying to take those into account.

And they've been pretty successful, it seems like, with that. Yeah, once they settle on what they all agree is a valid thing. Measurement. Yeah, valid measurement. But now, of course, people are consuming TV online more than ever on their laptops, on their tablets, on their mobile devices.

Can I throw out some figures for you real quick, Chuck? Please. Consider this, 116 million television sets in the United States. Yeah. There's 113 million tablets. What? Yeah.

166 million smartphones and 243 million internet connected computers, double the amount of televisions in the US. And people are watching stuff whenever they want, however they want, on this. And as it stands right now, Nielsen is still trying to figure out how the heck they can most effectively track these people.

Yeah, well, this is the first year. This fall TV season will be the very first year that they're going to supposedly have a across-the-board measurement system with TV ratings. It'll include viewership on everything, including your mobile device. And it's forced some innovation, too, because Nielsen can't just say, oh, well, we'll add an eavesdropper onto your tablet

or your smartphone, because it'll drain your battery. Yeah, what it'll probably be is a third-party app or piece of software. And it makes sense. It seems like it would be easier than ever to track watching habits in the near future. OK, it is if you're Google. If you're Nielsen, and you've been basically

caught off guard by this since you maybe started thinking about this in 2011, then you're in deep trouble. Oh, man, Nielsen. There's a very, very effective way of tracking computer use, Chuck, and it's called cookies. And cookies have been around forever. And they've gotten to the point now where they can plant cookies on your tablet, your smartphone,

your computer, however you, all these things you use. And after a while, just from paying attention to the data, the algorithm will basically say, I think these three cookies over here are the same person. And they'll put them together. And all of a sudden, what was once three users is now one. And the picture is that much clearer of who binged watch season two of True Blood this week.

So there's cookies out there, and they've been around for a while. And they're very easy to get and very easy to use. And this is what Nielsen's up against. Yeah, and you may be saying to yourself, well, who cares how people are watching it, if it's online or on TV? But what matters is advertisers, if you've noticed, if you watch those online, like with Hulu or something,

they're different commercials. You're not seeing the same stuff. And they still can't even decide now what to count, because they don't want to, you know, if Brad Pitt does a Pepsi commercial, he probably has it in his contract. Well, this can only run on air, on network, on air TV. In Thailand.

Yeah, don't show me on Hulu. I don't want my commercial running online. If I show up in South Korea, you owe me $10 million. That's right. So they have a lot of control on how their images are seen. Or maybe there's an awesome commercial that licensed the hoos won't get fooled again. It's only licensed for television.

They can't show that same commercial online. So you're going to have to show what some advertisers or shows or networks might consider a substandard ad. So they don't even want to count that as a view. Yeah. And the same applies to TV shows, too. There might be actors, writers that are just for on air and not for video distribution or just like with the ads.

So it seems to me like the there's, it's not just Neilson who's up against this. The networks are still trying to figure out things like TV everywhere. Like they want you to be able to watch TV everywhere you are at all times, because then they can serve you ads everywhere at all times. And they can charge for those kind of things.

But they can't say how to track this yet, one. And then not everything's cleared for all forms of media, two. The other problem with online viewing is they don't have that all important demographic detail. OK, again, though. Or they could, though. If they start using cookies, then

they've got it right there. This is what advertisers are salivating over, like hyper-targeted ads. So imagine if you and I are watching the same classic episode of Saturday Night Live. And I'm watching it on my computer. You're watching it on your computer. We're sitting right next to each other.

We press play at the same time. The ad break gets to the same spot at the same time. And then, boom, two different ads come up. Yeah, I get oval teen because I'm in my 40s. You get a Ferrari ad because you're five or six years younger. Exactly. That's exactly what would happen, too. So this is what advertisers want,

like that level of targeted. But the Nielsen company is still dominating. If they can catch up, the Nielsen company will be around for another 50, 100 years. But again, they're up against cookie tracking right now. And if somebody can come along and be like, hey, man, we've got all of your second screen data you could ever want, then, again, Nielsen's in big trouble.

Well, there are companies trying to do that. There's one called ComScore that says they can offer a single metric that shows who's watching television across every single platform you can think of. Time shifted, on demand, streaming, live, whatever. ComScore says they can do it. NBC has signed up with them, and they haven't dropped Nielsen. They're spending more money to try and get better tracking.

There's another company. They did that in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, right? Was that the trial? Yeah, I think that's when they rolled it out. Supposedly it was super successful. Yeah, that's what they said. And then there's another one called RENTrack that their origins were just a video cassette distributor,

but they realized that that was going nowhere in 2014. Even worse, they were beta. Yes, they diversified into TV ratings, and they use cable set-top boxes. And right now have deals with 70 networks and 300 TV stations. And basically, the competition, David Poletrack, he's a chief research officer for CBS Corporation, said that the competition on the research front

is the most intense it's ever been. Oh, it's a pretty exciting time. Yeah, and Nielsen actually, there was FTC anti-trust settlement, where I think the way I understand it is that Nielsen was using, they acquired a company called Arbitron, which is a specialist in radio and out-of-home measurement, and I think there was an anti-trust suit saying, like, you can't be the only people using this.

So they've now licensed that out. We're forced, I think, to license it out to ComScore, who is now using that portable people meter. Not purple people eater. No, man, but hats off to you for getting it right. And I think I'm understanding that correctly. But the long and the short of it is, unless they get this right, they think they are missing out on as much as 15%

of TV viewing is going unaccounted for at this point. So if you're a network or something like that, that's ad revenue, right? That's an ad rate hike that you aren't getting. If you're an advertiser, that's like a whole ghost group that you may or may not be getting your product in front of, but you can't say either way. Having 10 or 15% of the advertising or viewing audience

unaccounted for is not acceptable. To me, not in modern America, buddy, this is what I think is going to happen. I think they're going to get their jazz together and be able to track who watches a show down to 100%. And the people who make the shows will sell a package to an advertiser. And the advertiser spot runs in that show,

no matter where it's consumed. So it's like a 360 deal basically. Like this show is going to be broadcast live or broadcast on the neps. It's going to be up on our player. You're going to be able to watch it on tablet. But in all of these, it's going to be, when you buy an ad spot, it goes with the show,

no matter where the show goes. Right, I could see that. And then there's another happy aspect of tracking, viewing down to this granular detail. Your shows are more likely to be saved. Our show, again, I say, would not have been helped by any of this. But the whole reason community was online

or still on air was because the NBC was smart enough to be like, oh, well, wait a minute. Like, yeah, its ratings are abysmal, traditionally speaking. But on Twitter, it actually trends. It's like a worldwide trend. That's valuable. And they figured out that this is something

you have to take into account. Nielsen has as well. They launched a partnership with Twitter who in turn bought basically a TV trend tracking service. So now Nielsen's going to start taking Twitter trending into account, into its ratings. Yeah, and I think Nielsen has to deal with Facebook too, right? I believe so.

Yeah, to try and see, again, what's trending, I guess. Yeah, and so now it's not just going to be how many people are watching me, how many people are talking about it, how many people like dress up like that character on that night, that kind of thing. So really neat inventive shows that don't get a huge national audience

will maybe have a longer life. We might still have freaks and geeks. It's the, yes, that would be nice. Although that was a perfect run and encapsulated in one season. Yeah, it's pretty great. And everyone on that show went on to be huge movie stars almost, well, not everyone, but a lot of them did.

Most of them. Man, if we would have had time who we should have talked to about this was Luke Ryan. Oh yeah. Our buddy Luke is. He's movies though, right? Well, no, he does, he knows all about this stuff. He does TV as well, but he's just talking to him

as like he's always one step ahead. He's very, very forward thinking smart guy. He is. And I bet he would verify your theory on where we're headed, maybe tweak it. Well, Luke, if you're out there listening, let us know. He'd better be listening. And also I'm eternally grateful to Luke Ryan

for my Billy Zabka signed hot tub time machine poster. That's right. That's how we first met him, right? Yeah, that's pretty cool. If you want to know more about Luke Ryan or TV ratings, you can type either of those two into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said Luke Ryan, not Luke Brian.

Yeah. That's different. I don't even know who Luke Brian is. He's a huge big time country star. That's why I don't know who he is. Do you know he sold out like two shows at Madison Square Gardens? And like apparently he's the only one to ever do that.

He's huge. No, what do you, people sell out multiple shows at Madison Square Garden all the time. Like Bruce sells out like six, eight in a row. He's one of them. Okay. Maybe he broke like the time record or something. He's a good guy too, though.

If his name isn't Willie Nelson, then I don't know him. Well, anyway, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this a train conductor. I love that job. We had one that wrote in. Awesome. Hey guys, been wanting to write in for a while now. Been waiting until I could think of something interesting

to relate to you. I found your podcast a while back in February is looking for something to listen to while I commute to work. Working on a Penn Station for the Long Island Railroad as a train conductor means my hours tend to have me driving home anywhere from midnight to 3 a.m. Prior to finding your show,

all I listen to were audio books or the radio, but I got bored with all that after a while. And I noticed my eyelids were getting heavier and heavier. She's about 70 miles door-to-door on my trip. Yeah. It's no good. Enter stuff you should know. From the first time I listened to you guys,

I've been wide awake, amused and attentive the whole drive. That's why I want to thank you guys for keeping me alive because if not for your show, I'm sure I would have fallen asleep and driven off the road. Ever since childhood, I've always been fascinated about history and learning how things work and was evident by me dismantling my toys

and attempting to put them back together. Although it's funny in the end, I always had extra parts. So again, thank you for accompanying me on my drive home every night. It's been nice having three friends in the car, although one of you is extremely silent. That's Jerry. And by the way, Jerry didn't get canceled.

We were just joking. Yeah, all right. She's on the air. And that is from Angel Cartagena in Bethel, Connecticut. Or on hell. I wondered about that. He says, PS, if this becomes listener mail, I know you both try so hard to pronounce things.

My last name is Cartagena, like the city in the Romancing the Stone, but he didn't say if it was Angel or Angel. If his last name's Cartagena, it's Angel. I would think, but we'll see. We will see. Let us know, Angel. That's what I'm going with.

All right. If you want to let us know how to pronounce your name, we're always happy to hear from buddies out there who listen in listening land. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can post the pronunciation of your name on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com.

And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

How Stuff Works. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashers and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey, dude, the 90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush

boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.