Arbitron Media Study...

[HaventGotALife]

Well, starting on Monday or Tuesday I will become one of the people who determines the ratings for television. I will be paid in small gifts for doing this. They contacted me (for some reason) and they have already given me 10 dollars just to consider it. For the record, I will be watching a lot of PBS, news, and NBA basketball, browsing online a lot for this site as well as Facebook. So I will be pretty boring. But you can't sneeze at the money and the chance to be a part of the ratings when all I do is complain there's nothing good on television.

Has anyone else been a part of such a study? Do you have some suggestions of shows I should sample?

 

[scotpens]

Has anyone else been a part of such a study? Do you have some suggestions of shows I should sample?

I was on the Arbitron ratings panel for about 30 months. Apparently they just contact people at random. They give you a meter to carry on your person during waking hours, a data collector that you plug into your phone line, and a recharger that charges the meter and sends collected information to the phone gadget via low-power RF signal. The meter "knows" what you're watching or listening to by picking up sound signatures (it won't register if the TV sound is muted or if you're using headphones).

As for what to watch, well, I'd say just continue your normal viewing habits. That's the whole point of the ratings, after all -- to get a representative sample of what people are watching and listening to. Go for it -- you don't have to do any real work! It's basically free money.

 

[TemporalFlux]

I love doing those kinds of things; I feel like I have a vote in what's happening. The only thing I've ever done is the 7 day paper diary for Nielsen; I've done that twice now (about 5 years between).