Are Nielsen ratings accurate at all?

Nielsen Ratings

• Where do I find a current listing of the complete Nielsen television ratings. I have found a listing of the "Top 20" shows but I need the complete listing for ALL shows (50? 100?)including whatever show comes in dead last of all shows. Thanks in advance.

• Answer:

  Joew94.. Thanks for your question about the Nielsen ratings. The Nielsen ratings are handled by Nielsen Media Group (http://www.nielsenmedia.com)and have become the standard in determining the viewership of television shows. Using a system called Statistical Sampling, there are roughly 5,000 "Nielsen Families". These families have a "black box" on connected to their television sets which gather the data on which programs are being watched and sends this data to Nielsen each night. It is from this data (which, by the way is a very small sample of the projected 99 million homes with televisions) that the Nielsen numbers come to be. If you visit http://www.sfgate.com/tvradio/nielsens/, each week they provide the previous week's Nielsen ratings. The most current, dated November 12th, ranks 127 different programs. Also, if you visit the rec.arts.tv newsgroup (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=rec.arts.tv) they are posted there and there is some lively discussion. It appears that the overnights are posted there as well. Here is this week's posting for last weeks Nielens: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Nielsen+group:rec.arts.tv.*&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&scoring=d&selm=ut3l3qsmsfgkda%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=4 Thanks again for your question and if you need any further clarification, please let me know. Regards, -THV Search Strategy: Nielsen ratings television list References: How the Nielsens Work http://www.howstuffworks.com/question433.htm