Nielsen Ratings Will Now Track TV-Related Tweets Too

For a long time now, it has felt like there’s a disparity between what television shows get good ratings and which ones people seem to actually care about. If you view television like someone who is buying ad time, you’re looking at the Nielsen ratings, and by that standard NCIS is a way better show than Breaking Bad, even if no one has ever tweeted about NCIS.

But Twitter, just in time to prove its worth before the big IPO sale, has teamed up with Nielsen to measure and demonstrate which shows are birthing hashtags and getting in the eyeballs of even the disinterested-but-connected.

According to an announcement from Nielsen, which accompanied the release of the first Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, they will track not only the number of tweets, but the number of people that those tweets reach:

The new Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings measure not only “authors”—the number of people tweeting about TV programs—but also the much larger “audience” of people who actually view those Tweets.

Initial analysis of Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings reveals that the Twitter TV audience for an episode is, on average, 50 times larger than the authors who are generating Tweets. For example, if 2,000 people are tweeting about a program, 100,000 people are seeing those Tweets.

The theory is that if fans are engaged on Twitter that "means the ads are also being paid attention to," said Steve Kalb, director of video investment at Mullen, told the Wall Street Journal, and that should motivate advertisers to pay more for commercial air time during the well-tweeted shows.

Twitter officials are saying much the same thing, calling it engagement. "If your show is creating conversations on Twitter, it is more valuable, and you should get credit for that," said Rachael Horwitz, a spokeswoman for Twitter.

Advertisers, though, are wary of this, and for an understandable reason. This might just be me and my Twitter habits, but aren’t we all writing and reading those thousands of Tweets during the commercial breaks? In that same WSJ article, Ari Bluman, chief digital investment officer of GroupM, said there is "still so much more research that has to be done to understand the value of it.”

Hopefully they’ll figure out what to do with ironic tweets. "Sharknado" was a Twitter phenomenon but it got poor ratings, due to being a real piece of shit.

At any rate, my tweets would pretty much never count anyway, because sports—pretty much the only thing I consistently watch while its being broadcast—are excluded from the Nielsen Twitter TV ratings. That kind of skews any comparisons you’re going to make between the two ratings systems, since even the Sunday Night Football Pre-Game Show regularly cracks the Top 10. Another problem is that Nielsen keeps cable and broadcast TV ratings separated and nearly impossible to find.

But you can look at the two lists for September 23 to September 29, and it otherwise confirms what you’d expect: Nielsen highlights middlebrow CBS shows while Twitter was predictably dominated by Breaking Bad.

Top 10 By Ratings:

• NBC Sunday Night Football
• Big Bang Theory, Special
• NCIS
• The Big Bang Theory
• NCIS: Los Angeles
• The Crazy Ones
• The Voice on Monday
• The Voice on Tuesday
• Dancing With the Stars
• The OT

The Top 10 By Twitter:

• Breaking Bad
• The Voice on Monday
• Jimmy Kimmel Live
• Dancing With the Stars
• SEC Stories
• Grey's Anatomy
• The Voice on Tuesday
• Glee
• How I Met Your Mother
• The X Factor

It really drives home what we've long suspected: even when you view it through the lens of Twitter, The Voice is an unstoppable juggernaut, that's apparently better on Mondays.