SYSK Selects: How TV Ratings Work

has been canceled, okay, due to low ratings. You know it's funny, is um? Jerry has been portrayed on television and a TV show that was canceled due to poor ratings, poor ratings. That was our show. That was our show. We had a television show once. It was called Stuff you Should Know. It was a slightly fictionalized version of our life, our work life. We made a sitcom. Yeah we did. It's pretty cool and a lot of people loved it, and a lot of people are like, what

in the world did you do it that way? For? So that a lot it's like basically ten and ten. Oh yeah, you're referring to the Tony people who've seen this show. Yeah, actually we'll get to that all. But we, um, we know a little bit about how TV ratings work because of that, and uh, in some ways, I believe we're a victim of the antiquated system that is the Nielsen TV ratings. Now, dude, it's it's it's antiquated. Why it's changing. I do not disagree with the antiquated part.

What I do disagree with is that had it been up to date, I think it would have had zero impact on our success. I don't know, man, I will say this to the people out there. What um, what the network did was they looked only at one number, which is the amount of people that sat down in front of their television set on a Saturday night live at ten pm to watch our show. Right. They did not count things that we'll talk about like online streaming or DVR um or anything like that, which is what

makes it antiquated. Because it's it's changing, man, people aren't watching TV like they used to. But they're basing a lot of these uh decisions on a system that was designed in the nineteen fifties. So let's go back, man, it goes back even further than that. Back in the A. C. Nielsen Company started. At the time, people who were broadcasting

radio wanted to know what people were listening to. So there are a lot of companies that would telephone up family at random and say, say, fella, what are you listening to right now on the old Victor Rola The Amazing Adventure AWA, and uh he'd say, hey, thanks a lot, bub talk to you later, and they'd hang up a nickel fill your trouble. So that they because we're talking depression at this time, um, well not later on, they wish the head a nickel. Here's a chicken for your pot.

That's a Hoover reference. Man, you don't get those two often try to bust them out. So the Nielsen Company said, that's all fine and good. That's great that you guys are figuring out what people are listening to, but we have something even better because we are a technological powerhouse.

And what they did was they randomly picked some families around America and said, say, can we put this cool recording device in your home near your radio and it will record what you're listening to at any given time, and then we'll send technicians out to pick it up from time to time to get the information off of it and then bring it back so we can keep recording it. And family said sure, and the Nielsen Company's

domination of broadcast ratings was sealed. After that point, everybody from every competitor they had was just peanuts can here to the Nielsen Company, so much so that when you hear TV ratings, it's synonymous with Nielsen ratings, very much like Kleenex and UH facial tissue are one and the

same same thing thanks to Nielsen's technological powerhouse. The irony of it, though, is that once they started installing those boxes in the twenties or thirties, and then they moved on to television sets, the innovation, I mean they innovated somewhat fundamentally principally, it remained the same until a year or two ago. Yeah, and they're not, um, we'll get into all the hardware of the the hardware side of

how it works. But what they did in nur with send actual little diaries that you would fill out and pencil and send back. And they still do that today in two thousand fourteen, even though in two thousand six they said they were going to stop they still send those little diaries and you get a little diary in the mail with five one dollar bill really in the envelope for your troubles. And they look like the modern nickel.

Yeah exactly. And they rely on lazy, dishonest people to fill out this card and mail it back and then go spend that five dollars on a on a grande a latte. It would have gotten a lot more. Oh man, you could have bought a car. But but that is the diary version. What UM and and the networks and advertisers have never liked the diary version. They still don't know. But it's what's called sweep sweek, which is hard to say.

That's right, we'll get it sweeps in a second. But um what they mainly like to rely on are two different electronic hardware methods UM the set meters as in TV set and people meters. And right now they have by they plan to have more than sixty TV set meters. And this is just for the U. S and Canada, by the way, because everyone else is TV is weird. Yeah, simon, do you ever watched TV in different countries when you're traveling and stuff? Yes, And it is so much fun.

It is fun, but after a while you're like, I really miss American TV. Yeah, but I mean, if you're traveling abroad, you shouldn't be watching a whole lot of it was like late night in the hotel. It's one of but it's one of the great pluses is you're just like, I don't feel like watching this, will go

out and see the sights instead. Yeah. I think I was in Belgium watching TV with my buddy Brett years and years ago, and uh that was translated in English and subtitles and one of the characters said something and I guess I don't know if it was Flemish, and the other guy just looked and said I and it said me too. So we still say that today when we're responding me to do each other, we'll go I

all those years later. So anyway, Um, the set, Yeah, I said there were SI in thirty one uh markets, TV markets, and then there are about thirty five thousand, I believe. Now people meeters in those homes. I'm sorry in about homes and those people meeters are more specific because you can have three people meeters in one house. We want to see what little Susie's watching. We want to see what her brother Randy's watching, and they won't

see what her dad watches. Chafter everyone's gone to bed, so each one of them will have their own little people meeter that they'll turn on. And I always thought that these things were connected to your television like your cable box and it just kind of read the information. But they're actually listening devices. Isn't that weird? Totally blew

my mind. So basically at the podcast and the way that the way that Nielsen figures out what TV show you're talking to is because they have a device that's connected to the Internet that um is eaves dropping on your TV. And they just in two thousand and six finally got to the point where they perfected this technology and they have of codes that broadcasters, the networks and the local affiliates have to put in to their audio stream the audio video stream that just the audio stream.

Is it just audio? Yeah, but they're trying to come up with the video version. So basically, there's a a sound, there's a frequency that you can't hear. I don't even think your dog can hear it, but it comes through your TV and your Nielsen box can hear it. And it's a it's basically an audio fingerprint for a show. And when the Nielsen box here's that audio, it can be like, oh, well they're watching good Times right now.

That's funny. I was just thinking that good Times, yeah, and then I was like, no, I should say Three's Company instead. It's depends and then he said good Times. Although if you watch Good Times long enough, there's an episode of Three's Company coming on eventually on that channel. That's I think good Times maybe my favorite all time theme song. That's a good one. Oh man, it's so good, it's ridiculous. Did I tell you Henry Mancini did the

the What's Happening theme song? Yes? What episode was that in just a few ago? That was number Stations? Because the sound that the short wave thing mean, so uh. That's how Nielsen's been figuring out what people are watching, which is mind blowing. It's also if it seems a little backwards, yeah, it may be emblematic of a larger systematic resistance towards technological improvement. Yeah, or if it seems a little small as far as the sample pool goes um,

which it is it is. But what they do is they extrapolate that number, just like polsters do, and they say, well this, these are average markets, these are average families. Um, so if these eventually TV sets are watching this, we can pull that out and and do some sort of They probably do it on a chalkboard in a room.

There's this one guy who has the piece of chalk and the rapp Late sets out and says, well, this is what America is watching, which always has bugged me, especially when you have a TV show that gets canceled. It is because it all comes down to just how representative is your sample. So there's six TV sets there by two thousand fifteen, right now in two thousand fourteen, may have two thousand fourteen. There are a hundred and sixteen point three million TV sets in the US. So

this is a very small sample size. But if the guy with the chalk um Bert can can come up with a very good representative portion of the US. Like there's this many um divorced Hispanic families, there's this many um gay Asian households. There's like this many you know, Mitt Romney voters, And like they take all these guys and put them together and it's a clear cross section of America. That's America. Baby, you should be able to

extrapolate pretty pretty well from that, that's true. It just all depends on how good their statisticians are, that's right. And they do audits over the years and quality checks of course, and compare ratings from different samples. So it's not like they just said it, I saw we're doing it, although they sort of do that, but they do they

do quality checks of course. Yeah. One of the problems is like there's been so few challenges from outside competition that Nielsen can do whatever it wants, and it's so powerful that it literally has the entire television industry at its feet. It decides what rating a TV show gets, and ultimately the whole point to all of this stuff, to TV ratings in general, is so that networks and their local affiliates can set advertising rates for advertisers. There's

seventy eight billion dollars at stake. That's the advertising spent in a year on television, and it all comes down to what rating Nielsen, with their representative sample and their audio eavesdropping boxes and their five dollar bills in a paper diary, decide that your TV show got. That's right. That's the dirty little secret. Is that they don't care how many people are watching that TV show. They care

about how many people are watching the commercials. Yeah, that's really what they're looking at, and more specifically what demographic, which is why I don't think we mentioned why the people meters are so valuable, because they want to get that specific demo so they can show advertisers eighteen to forty nine year olds. They spend a ton of money and they're watching, uh, they're watching Community, but no one else is, so we'll cancel Community, which is kind of crazy,

as we'll see in a little a little while. Yeah, but um, just quickly let me go over. I think most people know this. But if you've got a half hour TV show and um, you're gonna have twenty two minutes of uh TV show, then you're gonna have eight minutes of commercial. Six of those are national ads sold by the network, and then your local affiliate is that's where you're gonna get your awesome commercials. Hey just for the Wolfman two minutes worth or crazy Eddie. I remember

was big up in the Northeast. And then so this is two thousand and six. I couldn't find one recently, but back in two thousand and six. You if you're buying a commercial slot from a local affiliate, you're gonna pay about a hundred dollars to two thousand dollars depending on This is during the daytime. This isn't like three am, but depending on what show. So, like back when Oprah was on, you could get a thirty second spot for

ninety bucks you could affiliate. Yeah, you could also pay up to two thousand dollars for it, and then apparently you're going to double that for um a national ad for a thirty second spot during the day which isn't just not outlandish. Well that's how crazy, Eddie, I mean, yeah, or the Wolfman, they don't have a ton of money. Although I don't know a wolfman wore a lot of jewelry. Yeah, that's true. For those of you who don't know who the Wolfman is, we understand because you probably didn't live

in Atlanta. Yeah, I bet its Southeast. I bet it was on like WTVS and stuff. All you have to do is go type in Wolfman Donna gallery furniture into the YouTube's and it will show you some classic gallery furniture ads, or just type in hey, ask for the Wolfman no, ask for Donna. I don't remember that part. What you don't remember Donna his daughter with the hair. The whole premise of the ad man wanted you to come see him, and she'd say, hey, ask for the

wolf Man. She go, no, ask for Donna. All right, Sweeps everyone's heard it. Um it is a bit everywhere. Yeah, everyone hears about you know this is SWEEPS weeks. That's when well, well we'll tell you what it is. This is the fact that the podcast. To me what SWEEPS week? Yeah,

where it came from and why it exists. Well, in is when they started sending out those TV diaries and uh, they made a geographic sweep starting in the northeast across the country from east to west, and they collected the little booklets and those were our first reportings of TV writings. So before they had they had the eavesdropping boxes that they were using. But it was basically like um, this this These are I think maybe up to twenty thousand

households at one point in the major markets. The the great thing about the paper diaries is they could go into local markets, smaller markets and find out not just what you know, the people in New York or l A or Chicago were watching, but what the people and you know Santa Fe were watching too, or you know Fort Lauderdale. Yeah, those are saying, how does it play in Santa Fe? Sheboygan or something probably or Walla, Walla,

I can't remember. It may have been a movie thing too, but that there's an industry saying how does it play in the city. It's out of rhyme, because that's what matters, you know. Of course New York, in l A and the major markets are going to consume. Uh, they want to know what your average household wants to see, right, And this is this is the first time that anyone had ever taken a really comprehensive snapshot of what America was watching in a given week. And so they said, hey,

this worked really well. We're gonna start doing this every year. We're gonna have what's now called a sweeps week and it's going to be on this week. And so the TV executive said, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, Sweeps Week, this is what we're gonna start setting our advertising rates against. And it's going to be this week, and I'm going to do the craziest stuff I can think of to get ratings as as big and wide as I possibly can grab on that week, and that

is where sweep Sweet came from. And we've seen some pretty interesting things as a result of Sweeps weak. Yeah, there's um a great tradition of stunt casting during sweeps week. Justin Bieber will show up on c S. I. I didn't see that one, did you? And I don't watch that show, and if I did, I would have punched my TV if he showed up on it. Um, if you're gonna shoot JR, you're gonna do it during sweeps weeks.

Oh yeah. The late night talk shows are gonna load up their their biggest A list guests during sweeps week. E R did a live show. Yeah. I actually watched that one, and I wasn't an e R fan. I just wanted to see if they could pull it off. Yeah right, it's pretty cool. Ellen used to have a sitcom based on her life and she came out on that show during sweep sweek. Oh yeah, that's right. And very famously there was a not one, not too but thrice part Happy Days where Fonzie jumps a shark on

water skis that sweeps that happened during sweep Sweek. Wow, that's a sweeps failure. Well, i'll know if people watched it. Yeah, I don't guess you can call it a failure because that's probably US iconic. Yeah, it's part of the lexicon. Now do you remember an arrested development where Henry Winkler jumps over Shark Classic. Uh, these days, sweep Sweek is actually sixteen weeks because they have I don't know, but

narrowed it down. They broadened it out to four four week periods in November of February, May and July, and um, they still tried out uh special things for sweeps but it's not It definitely doesn't have the teeth that it used to because the way that people consume media these days, which we're gonna you know, start getting into. So no, it doesn't have the teeth that it used to. And and as a result, um, a lot of networks have kind of stopped, like you said, doing the stunt casting

and that kind of stuff. But it's still as a um, um, it's still basically holding broadcast TV hostage because that is still what advertisers want to see, Well, what are your ratings during sweeps Week? And that's what they set their ad rates against So the fact that there are these four month long sweeps weeks, um means that the broadcasters have to follow the normal fall the summer broadcast model

with reruns in between. Yeah. And this is for for NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, like the major broadcast networks non cable networks, which is a completely dying beast. Yeah, because they rely exclusively on advertising, and cable has been eating their lunch because advertising has been going down. It looks like it's already peaked. It's still seventy eight million dollars billion billion. Yes, you're right, but cable takes a huge substantial portion of that in advertising.

But then even when advertising rates go down, cable still survives because cable makes money off of subscriber fees yep, and transmission fees to yeah exactly, which is why a cable has a big leg up. And also they can, um, they don't have a traditional television season. They can release stuff all year long and uh, you can binge watch it, yeah,

which is happening. That's that's the new model. So, like we said, for many years, um Nielsen was just kind of as this one Wired article, the Nielsen family is dead. Put it it was in a torpor. And the first thing that really perfect um the first thing that really roused um Nielsen was DVRs because when DVRs came along, the advertising industry was like, oh god, people can fast forward through ads now. Yeah, like they've always dreamed of

doing exactly now they can. And it was the basically the television apocalypse and that didn't pan out because advertisers figured out that, yeah, people can ever, we can fast forward two ads, but there's ways to still get your message across at sixteen time speed. You can do things called popbusters where you use the actors or the look or the set of the TV show that you're advertising within to make them think like the show just came

back on and you caught them yep. Because it's really an ad um there's all sorts of stuff you can do. So it hasn't been an advertising apocalypse. And as a result, because DVRs are clearly clearly here to stay and have been since you know, the early two thousand's, um Nielsen has had to kind of finally be like, Okay, we need to innovate a little bit and figure out how to include DVR because not everybody's sitting down at eight o'clock on a Monday night and watching Murder, she wrote,

nobody is Man. I watched a couple of episodes the other night. I love that show. I've never seen one episode. What I know, man, it is good? Is it's good? M Another thing too? Uh just the backtrack is I've noticed lately is um, you're on demand watching, which a lot of cable companies. I'm a Comcast person by because I'm forced to be. Yeah, um yeah, a lot of the the on demand shows now within the first like a couple of weeks that they're available, you can't fast

forward through. Oh yeah, Like do you hit the fast forward button and a little null sign comes up and says, sorry, you're gonna have to sit through this. The DVR, I guess the fact that the DVR is connected to the internet and is because it's getting show information. The the actual show is being recorded on your physical hard drive. I'm sure there's cloud DVR recorders or whatever, but for the most part, there's a hard drive that's recording shows

onto your DVR. And then the other capability is that is connected to the internet, which is where it gets show information and all that stuff to present to you. But the Internet, as you may have figured out by now, is a two way street. Not only can information be downloaded to your home, it can be uploaded. And that

includes your preferences. How what shows you watch, um, how often you watch them, when you watch them, and so all of a sudden, the DVR companies are like, hey, Nielsen's giving you guys like eight pm on NBC ratings. We've got all of these other ratings that they're not

taking into account that you can get from us. Not only that, but they can actually tell when you're pausing your TV because the infamous nip slip hate even saying those words uh in the two thousand four Super Bowl with Janet Jackson, they uh TiVo the popular DVR company, although the people still use Tvo. They probably do. I

don't know. It's like every local cable company has their own dv R now it seems like it, but um, they were able to say that was the most replayed clip h in the history of TiVo up into that point was people pausing and rewinding. That's stupid, stupid stunt, right, But like you were saying, they've now decided. Um, But at least some networks have decided they're gonna start counting, Um what's it called the DVR I'm so better the

DVR plus system, which is DVR UM live plus same day. Yeah, that's the Nielsen method Live plus three days or Live plus three and then Live plus seven, which is obviously live plus same days if you just watch it later that night. UM plus three is three days within three days, and then seven is within that week. And I'm seeing like conflicting information out there. Seems like either they they now have basically just Live plus Live plus three, which

is um like their main measurement. Well, what matters is what the advertisers say is what we care about, Like, you can have Live plus twenty, but if the advertisers are like, we don't care about Live plus twenty, that doesn't do anything for us. Exactly, it's true, but it sounds like you're right. Like at one point they tried to say that Live plus same Day is basically the same thing Nielsen did and the advertising and they wanted to lump it together with Live and and the advertisers like, no,

that's really not the same. So because of the fast forwarding thing, Yeah, so let's at least separate these numbers out so we can look at it all individually. Yeah. UM. The thing is is the people who are watching TV, you know, I, EU and I UM, we don't care what the advertisers think, and they basically just need to keep up with our viewing habits, which are changing radically.

The broadcast networks have lost seventeen percent of the most coveted demographic eighteen to forty nine year olds between two thousand and twelve and two thirteen, sevent just gone. Part of that is because the networks put out terrible, terrible stuff,

although so did the cable networks these days too. But another part of it is because broadcast is stuck in this sweep weeks sweeps week um certain time and on a certain day format that has been in forever since the fifties, and they're being basically held hostage by Nielsen's ratings.

So there's been a real push to advance technologically and to start taking into account these other myriad ways that people consume television and uh, getting a clear picture of what an audience is doing, and the fact that it's now computer based and we have ways of tracking computers. Really, broadcasters are as excited as ever and we just have to figure out how to do it, and we'll talk about how they're trying to figure out how to do

it right after this. Well, one thing before we get to the internet, UM that we haven't mentioned yet is you might hear in UH TV parlance the word share as opposed to rating. Uh. And what that is is a is a share is how many people are watching a certain TV show that are actually watching TV. UM. A rating is just how many people are watching it, But the share is how many people what share of people are watching a show that are watching something other

people like? If your TV is off, it doesn't count. Know that your share numbers always gonna be higher. Yeah it is. But the rating is the number of people watching it compared to the entire population of America, right exactly. For Canada, Yeah, I keep forget about Canada. They steal our shows. UM. So now we're onto the the newest development. UM DVRs kind of threw a wrench in the plans, but they're trying to take those into account and they've

they've been pretty successful, it seems like with that. Yeah, once they settle on what they all agree is a valid thing measurement. Yeah, valid measurement um. But now, of course, people are consuming TV online more than ever, on their laptops, on their tablets, their mobile devices, and throughout some figures for you real quick, Chuck, please consider this A hundred

and sixteen million television sets in the United States. There's a hundred and thirteen million tablets, Yeah, a hundred and sixties six million smartphones, and two hundred and forty three million Internet connected computers, double the amount of televisions in the US. And people are watching stuff whenever they want, however they want on this and as it stands right now, Nielsen is still trying to figure out how the heck they can most effectively track these people. Yeah, well, this

is the the first year. Uh, this fall TV season will be the very first year that uh, they're gonna supposedly have a across the board measurement system with TV ratings that will include viewership on everything, including your mobile device, and has forced some innovation too, because the Nielson can't just say, oh, well, we'll add like an eavesdropper onto your tablet or your smartphone because it'll drain your battery. Yeah.

What it will probably be is a is a third party app or a piece of software, and it makes sense. It seems like it would be easier than ever to track watching habits in the near future. Okay, it is. If your Google, if you're Nielsen, and you've been basically caught off guard by this since you know, you maybe started thinking about this in two thousand and eleven, then you're in deep trouble. There's a very very effective way

of tracking computer use, Chuck, and it's called cookies. And cookies have been around forever, and they've gotten to the point now where they can plant cookies on your tablet,

your smartphone, your computer. However, you have all these things you use, and after a while, just from paying attention to the data they're they're the algorithm will basically say, I think these three cookies over here are the same person, and they'll put them together and all of a sudden, what was once three users is now one and the picture is that much clear of who binge watched season

two of True Blood this week? You know. Yeah, So there's cookies out there, and they've been around for a while, and they're very easy to get, very easy to use, and this is what Nielsen's up against. Yeah, and you may be saying yourself, well, who cares how people are watching it if it's online or on TV. But what matters is advertisers. Uh. If you've noticed, if you watch shows online like with Hulu or something, they're different commercials.

You're not seeing the same stuff. And they still can't even decide now what to count because they don't want to. Uh. You know, if if Brad Pitt does a pepsi commercial, he probably has it in his contract. Well, this can only run on on network on air TV in Thailand. Don't don't show me on Hulu. I don't want my commercial running online. If I show up in South Korea, you owe me ten million dollars. That's right. So they have a lot of control on how their images are seen.

Or maybe they uh, maybe there's an awesome commercial that licensed, Um the who's won't get fooled again, it's only license for television. They can't show that same commercial online, so you're gonna have to show what some advertisers or or shows or networks might consider uh, substandard ad So they don't want to count that as a view. Yeah, and

the same applies to TV shows. To there there might be actors writers that are just for on air and not for video distribution or um, just like with the ads. So it seems to me like the the there's it's not just Nielsen's up against this. The networks are still trying to figure out things like TV everywhere, Like they want you to be able to watch TV everywhere you are at all times, because then they can serve you ads everywhere at all times and they can charge for

those kind of things. But they can't say how to track this yet one and not everything's cleared for all forms of media to the other problem with online viewing is they don't have that all important demographic detail okay again though or they could though if they start using cookies, then they've got it right there that this is what

advertisers are salivating over, like hyper targeted ads. So like, imagine if you and I are watching the same like classic episode of Saturday Night Live, and I'm watching on my computer, You're watching on your computer. We're sitting right next to each other. We pressed play at the same time, the ad break gets to the same spot at the same time, and then boom, two different ads come up. Yeah, I get because I'm in my forties, you get a

ferrari ad because you're five or six years younger. Exactly, that's exactly what would happen to. So this is what advertisers want, like that level of targeted. But the Nielsen Company is still dominating. If they can catch up, the Nielsen Company will be around for another fifty hundred years. But again they're up against cookie tracking right now. And if somebody can come along and be like, hey man, we've got all of your second screen data you could

ever want, then again Nielsen's in big trouble. Well, there are companies trying to do that. There's one called Calm Score that says they can offer a single metric that it shows who's watching television across every single platform you can think of time shifted, on demand, streaming, live, whatever. Calm scores as they can do it. Uh, NBC has signed up with them and they haven't dropped Nilsen. You know, they're just spending more money to try and get better tracking.

There's another company. They did that in the two thousand fourteen Sochi Olympics, right was at the trial. Yeah, I think that's when they rolled it out. Supposedly was super successful. Yeah, that's what they said. Um and then there's another one called ring Track that uh they their origins were just a video cassette distributor, but they realized that that was

going nowhere. In two thousand fourteen, even worse, they were Beta. Yes, they've diversified into TV ratings and they use cable set top boxes and right now have deals with seventy at works and three TV stations and basically the competition. David Poltrak, he's a chief research officer for CBS Corporation, said that it's the competition on the research front is the most

intense it's ever been and pretty exciting time. Yeah, and Nielsen actually those um FTC antitrust settlement where I think the way I understand it is that Nielsen was using uh they they acquired a company called Arbitron, which is a specialist in radio and out of home measurement, and I think there was an anti trust suit saying like you can't be the only people using this. So they've

now licensed that out. Uh we're forced, I think to license it out to Calm Score, who is now using that portable people meter, not purple people Eater, And I think I'm understanding that correctly. But the long and The short of it is, unless they get this right, they think they're missing out on as much as five percent of TV viewing is going unaccounted for at this point. So if you like you're a network or something like that, that's ad revenue, right, that's an ad rate hike that

you aren't getting. If you're an advertiser, that's like a whole like ghost group that you may or may not be getting your product in front of. But like you can't say either way, Um, there's yeah, having ten or fift percent of the advertising or viewing audience on accounting for is not acceptable to me. Not in modern America, buddy.

This is what I think is gonna happen. I think they're gonna get their their jazz together UM and be able to track who watches a show down to UM and the people who make the shows will sell a package to an advertiser, and the advertiser spot runs in that show no matter where it's consumed. So it's like a three sixty deal. Basically, like this is going to be broadcast live or broadcast on on the NEPs. It's going to be up on our player. You're gonna be

able to watch it on tablet. But in all of these it's going to be when you buy an ad spot, it goes with the show, no matter where the show goes. I could. And then there's another happy aspect of tracking viewing, like down to this granular detail, your shows are more likely to be saved. Our show, again, I say, would

not have been held by any of this. But the whole reason community was online or still on air, it was because the NBC was smart enough to be like, oh, well, wait a minute, Like, yeah, it's ratings are abysmal traditionally speaking, but on Twitter it actually trends. It's like a worldwide trend that's valuable, and they figured out that this is this is something you have to take into account. Nielsen

has as well. They launched a partnership with Twitter, who in turn bought like a basically a TV trend tracking service. So now Nielsen is going to start taking Twitter trending into account into its ratings. And I think they think Nielsen has a deal with Facebook too, right, I believe. So you have to try and uh, see again, what's trending? I guess yeah. And so now it's not just going to be how many people are watching, how many people are talking about it, how people like dress up like

that character on you know that night, that kind of thing. Um, so really neat inventive shows that don't get a huge national audience, well, maybe have a longer life. We might still have freaks and geeks. It's the Yes, that would be nice. Although that was a perfect run and encapsulated in one season. Yeah, it's pretty great. And everyone on that show went on to be huge movie stars almost well not everyone, but a lot of them did most

of them? Um Man. You know who if we would have had time, who we should have talked to you about this was Luke Ryan. Oh yeah, our buddy Luke is his movies though right well now he does. He knows all about the stuff. He does TV as well. But he's just talking to him is like he's always one step ahead. He's very very forward thinking guy, and I bet he would verify your theory on where we're headed, maybe tweak it. Well, Luke, if you're out there listening,

let us know you'd better be listening. Um And also, I'm eternally grateful to Luke Ryan for my Billy's ABCA signed the hot Tub time Machine poster. That's right, that's how we first met him, right, that's pretty cool. Uh. If you want to know more about Luke Ryan or TV ratings, you can type either of those two into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. Uh. And since I said Luke Ryan, not Luke Brian, Yeah, that's different. I don't even know who. Look Brian is. Oh,

he's a huge, big time country star. That's why I don't know who. Do you know? He's sold out like two shows at Madison Square Gardens and like apparently he's the only one to ever do that. He's huge. What do you people sell out multiple shows at Madison Square Garden all the time, Like Bruce sells out like six eight in a row. He's one of them. Okay, maybe he broke like the time record or something, but he's a He's a good guy too though. You know, if

his name isn't Willie Nelson, then I don't know him. Well. Anyways, time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this train conductor. I love that job. We had one that wrote in. Um Hey, guys, been wanting to write in for a while now. I've been waiting until I could think it's

something interesting to relate to you. I found your podcast a while back in February is looking for something to listen to while I commute to work working out a pin station for the Long Island Railroad as a train conductor, means my hours tend to have me driving home anywhere from midnight to three am. Prior to finding your show, all I listened to our audiobooks or the radio. But I got bored with all that after a while, and I noticed my eyelids were getting heavier and heavier, which

is about seventy miles door to door trip. Yeah, it's no good enter stuff. You should know from the first time I listen to you, guys have been wide awake, amused, and attended the whole drive. That's why I want to thank you guys for keeping me alive, because if not for your show, I'm sure I would have fallen asleep and driven off the road. Ever since childhood, I've always been fascinated about history and learning how things work. Uh and was evident by me dismantling my toys and attempting

to put them back together. Although it's funny, in the end, I always had extra parts. So again, thank you for accompanying me on my drive home. Every night. It's been nice having three friends in the car, although one of you is extremely silent. That's Jerry. And by the way, Jerry didn't get canceled. We were just joking. She's she's on the air. Uh, and that is from Angel, Cartagena and Bethel, Connecticut or on Hell. I wondered about that, he says, PS if this becomes listener male, I know

you both try so hard to pronounce things. My last name is Cartagena, like the city in Romancing the Stone. But he didn't say if he's in Hell or Angel. If his last name is Cartagena, it's on Hell, I would think, but we'll see, we will see. Let us know on Hell. That's what I'm going with, all right. Uh, if you want to let us know how to pronounce your name, We're always happy to hear from buddies out there who listen in listening Land. You can tweak to

us at s y s K podcast. You can post the pronunciation of your name on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and as always, hang out with us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.