Categorized | Broadcast TV

Nielsen Corrects ABC World News Ratings

Posted on 17 June 2009 by Bill Gorman

Ooops! The Nielsen conspiracy mill will need to work overtime to get through all this new grist.

Nielsen has reissued ratings data for ABC from Friday, June 12, the day of the DTV Transition.

A number of ABC affiliates made the switch from analog to digital before the midnight deadline, and as a result were counted incorrectly, Nielsen says.

ABC World News with Charles Gibson, which had originally been pegged with 4.09 million viewers that day, received a nice bump with the update. The revised data pushes World News up to 6.34 million total viewers, on the low end for the week, but in line with viewership levels on a normal summer Friday.

via Broadcasting & Cable.

Earlier we had the item about ABC’s call for an investigation of World News Ratings.

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  • clutz, my guess is that a lot of stations changed something in their signal or channel or whatever and Nielsen wasn't counting that as those stations yet. If that makes sense.
  • clutz
    So they were not counting the digital channels when the news was broadcast, because those channels were supposed to be analog at that time? That still does not make sense to me. I don't see why they weren't counting every possible channel that every meter was reading. If they notice the equivalent of 2 million viewers watching some "different" channel (meters registering something other than ABC analog), they should have figured out what that channel was, IMHO.
  • clutz, my information goes only as far as those B&C articles, but while the ABC miscount is related to the DTV switch, it doesn't have anything to do with the "digital unready" households, and instead that Nielsen was not counting the proper channels for some ABC affiliates because the timing of the switch in some local markets was out of sync with their counting.
  • clutz
    Their reasoning does not fly with me. If a Nielsen home was ready for the conversion on time, why would it matter if they were analog or digital? The meter would be counting no matter what, wouldn't it?

    And if only 2.5 million households are without TV, were 2.25 of them watching ABC News? ;)
  • Catherine
    In a logical world Nielsen just could have told everyone that they were not counting anyone on that day due to the time staggering of the digital switch on Friday. If the nightly news numbers were off wouldn't the rest of the shows, the ones that don't have a consistent daily average for comparison, be off too? Of course that was why the all important February ratings period was postponed until March specifically to avoid the February digital switch. They KNEW the digital switch would cause ratings problems.
  • InsulinJunkie
    >>> A number of ABC affiliates made the switch from analog to digital before the midnight deadline, and as a result were counted incorrectly, Nielsen says.

    The majority of stations had switched before midnight.

    Geez, Chicago and Milwaukee were mostly switched by noon, although it was somewhat staggered. There was an instance or two where a station in one market had to wait for a station in another market to pull the plug on their analog, so it would free up the frequency.
  • Joss's Biggest Fan
    Woohoo! This gives me new hope that those nasty Nielsen people will revise Dollhouse's ratings up, up, up where they belong!

    93 days til Dollhouse comes back! Hip hip hooray!
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