The Nielsen ratings sytem for television shows has long been outdated as, now, a substantial amount of audience tend to watch TV on their phones, laptops, tablets or various other devices. It's the future, guys, get with it. Luckily though, Nielsen proved their relevance today by releasing a new study called "The Follow-Back," which analyzed live ratings for 221 primetime TV shows and compared it to the Twitter activity about the show. Their intent was to figure out whether or not TV ratings really are affected by Twitter activity, much like we saw in the case of Scandal, which has seen a steady growth in viewership thanks to massive amounts of attention on Twitter, and Sharknado, which pulled in more tweets than even Game of Thrones' insane Red Wedding episode.
Their findings were big, to say the least. From the study:
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Specifically, the findings revealed that reality TV was the most affected, which makes sense: If I saw someone tweeting about someone doing something crazy on a reality TV episode, I would probably watch it.
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According to the Chief Research Officer at Nielsen, Paul Donato, the point of the study was to figure out what exactly the relationship is between television and social media activity so advertisers can better figure out how exactly to sell things to viewers. "Media companies and advertisers have already made investments in social media outreach as a means of engaging more directly with consumers, and we believe there are worthwhile opportunities for Nielsen to conduct additional research that can help quantify the relationship between television and social media activity," he explained.
Just as Big Brother and 1984 intended.
[via Nielsen]
