A new report reveals that TV networks skew their ratings by misspelling the titles of their programs in order to trick the ratings-algoritms that measure their performance. Newsbusters explains:
In TV Ratings Game, Networks Try to Dissguys Bad Newz from Nielsen:
They misspell shows to fool the firm’s automated system into ignoring broadcasts on nights with few viewers; “NBC Nitely News”
In a game largely sanctioned by TV-ratings firm Nielsen, television networks try to hide their shows’ poor performances on any given night by forgetting how to spell.
That explains the appearance of “NBC Nitely News,” which apparently aired on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend this year, when a lot of people were away from their TVs. The retitling of “NBC Nightly News” fooled Nielsen’s automated system, which listed “Nitely” as a separate show.
Hiding the May 26 program from Nielsen dramatically improved the show’s average viewership that week. Instead of falling further behind first-place rival “ABC World News Tonight,” NBC news narrowed the gap.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC declined to comment. The network, though, groused last month when NBC News intentionally misspelled an entire week of “Nightly News” broadcasts. Altogether, NBC, which is ranked second behind ABC in ratings, has played the misspell card 14 times since the start of the 2016-17 television season last fall.
Newsbusters accurately notes that Nielsen's convenient obliviousness to the practice, when it is in fact aware of it, is cause for real concern:
... Nielsen projects viewer ratings based on a panel of more than 40,000 homes and 100,000 people. Higher ratings help networks sell commercial time at higher rates. The network misspellings fudge that calculation, and some advertisers say the trick is getting overused.
“Networks never used to do this,” said Billie Gold, director of programming at ad giant Dentsu Inc. Now, she said, it has become the norm.
TV news executives say the higher numbers gathered from show misspellings are used only for publicity purposes, and that accurate ratings for the missing broadcasts are readily available to advertisers.
Thus, the broadcast networks are clearly abusing a tool Flint describes as having been "reserved primarily for Christmas and Thanksgiving or if a show was pre-empted in parts of the U.S. for a live sports event."
It's important to unpack the final excerpted paragraph, because what is happening can be boiled down to two old-fashioned words.
The nets are admitting that they exclude low-viewership shows to inflate their reported average nightly audience "for publicity purposes." Apparently, they believe the public is too stupid to understand a disclosure that might, as an example, say that "this week's average audience was affected by a low getaway day before Memorial Day weekend." So they exclude the slow night or nights, and publicly pretend that their average audience reflect a full Monday-Friday week.
More proof that Fake News is, in fact, Fake News.
