Comments on: Nielsen Top Ten, December 5th, 1966 – December 18th, 1966

By: Barry I. Grauman

Barry I. Grauman — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:31:16 +0000

The December 18th episode of “WALT DISNEY’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR” was special in more ways than one- it became a “living memorial” to Walt, as he died of lung cancer just three days before it aired. His original opening monologue was deleted, as various celebrities associated with Disney and NBC {among them, Chet Huntley and Dick Van Dyke} paid tribute to him before “Disneyland Around the Seasons” appeared, as scheduled. Very sad, yet what better way to honor his memory than allowing the presentation of a “promotional travelogue” involving the ONE thing he put so much time and effort into (and was most proud of creating), during his final years?

By: RGJ

RGJ — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:37:27 +0000

The way I understand it, Nielsen has been expanding its viewer tracking into new media — DVRs, streaming video online, paid downloads — or at least there are ways for the networks to track such information. The issue is that, as of yet, such viewing is still quite small and advertisers aren’t interested in paying for it.

Of course, there have been complaints about Nielsen since at least the 1960s but it is still the ratings system of choice.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:54:00 +0000

It is interesting that years later, despite the introduction of new media, we are still using more or less the same TV ratings system.There is a generation of people that is not being captured by these traditional ratings. For example the hottest non College Basketball show that social media users were watching last night was “Dollhouse” on FOX. I have created Twielsen, http://twielsen.com , a TV show rating system based on social media chatter that captures the TV watching habits of the new generation. Since http://twielsen.com is a real time system, people can use it to find out the shows to watch for the night by checking out the hottest shows on TV “right now”.