Someone please teach me how to read these rating numbers? I am confuse
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Originally Posted by John
From what I understand, that is not 100% correct, actually. It doesn't measure TVs, it measures Households. For example a Household may have multiple TVs. If they are all tuned to the same program it is still only counted as one Household. If they are all tuned to different programs, then each program gets to count that particular Household.
And, more importantly, the first number is not in millions, it is a percentage just like the second number is.
If a Nielsen result for a show is "5.5/10" (for example), here is what that means...
Nielsen currently estimates that there are 106.7 million households with at least one television. At any given time, though, only a fraction of ALL households are watching any of their TVs. During Summer 2003, most nights of PrimeTime, about 50% - 60% of all households were watching something, with those being split about equally between "the main 6 broadcast networks" and "cable networks".
The "5.5" part of the Nielsen number means that ABOUT 5.5% of ALL HOUSEHOLDS had at least one of their TVs tuned to that program. That would be about 5.87 million households.
The "10" part of the Nielsen number means that ABOUT 10% of THOSE HOUSEHOLDS THAT WERE WATCHING SOMETHING had at least one of their TVs tuned to that program.
The second number in the Nielsen number will ALWAYS be higher.
You can estimate very roughly how many households were watching TV at that time by using the Nielsen numbers. 5.5 divided by 10 multiplied by 106.7 equals 58.7 million households were watching SOMETHING at that time.
NEITHER Nielsen number tells you the actual TOTAL NUMBER OF VIEWERS, though. But, for TAR you can get a very rough estimate by taking the "5.5" part of the Nielsen number and multiply it times 1.5, since TAR averages ABOUT 1.5 viewers per Nielsen rating.
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