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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Meet Mr. Nielsen

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918 with a degree in electrical engineering, Arthur Charles Nielsen started his career in product testing. In 1923, he launched the A.C. Nielsen Company to apply scientific methods to measure consumer behavior and provide data-driven insights into companies’ product and marketing strategies.

Originally focused on testing things like floor wax, detergent, and cereal sales, Nielsen began measuring radio audiences in the 1930s, just as the medium became a dominant cultural and economic force. By capturing a representative sampling of what audiences were listening to, Nielsen could charge both broadcasters and sponsors for something priceless: numbers.

In 1936, Nielsen introduced the Audimeter, a device placed in a select number of households attached to their radios to record what stations they listened to and when. The data was stored on a rotating paper disk or film strip inside the device.  Starting in 1942, this data was compiled into the “Radio Index” that ranked the popularity of programs and stations. 

Nielsen’s only real competition in the 1930s and 40s was The Hooper Ratings. Created by Claude E. Hooper in 1934, his system employed banks of telephone surveyors who called households and asked, “What are you listening to?”  Hooper’s method was fast and cheap, but seriously flawed:  it relied too heavily on listeners’ memory, couldn’t sample people without phones, and couldn’t track actual tuning behavior.

A Technical Marvel

The Hooper system was no match for the Audimeter, which was a technical marvel in its day. The Audimeter’s automated tracking provided far more reliable data than Hooper’s phone surveys, and quickly became the industry standard for broadcast ratings.

By the time Americans stopped staring at their radios and started gazing at glowing cathode ray tubes, Nielsen had a near monopoly on the ratings business, and was ready to turn his own gaze – and metrics – toward the new frontier.  

Likewise, the networks were desperate to prove television’s viability to radio advertisers, who needed convincing before taking on the added expense.  The networks turned to Nielsen to justify the premium ad rates they wanted to charge for television.  Nielsen had the infrastructure, so when the networks, sponsors, and Madison Avenue needed him, A.C. Nielsen was already in the catbird seat. 

In the spring of 1950, Nielsen retrofitted the Audimeter to detect which channel a TV set was tuned to.  As with radio, the channel-switching data was recorded on film or paper and retrieved periodically by field agents. Nielsen added another audience-tracking innovation when they asked their registered households to keep a daily diary of viewer numbers and demographics. The result was a hybrid system that delivered the most reliable television audience data available at the time.

The networks didn’t just adopt A.C. Nielsen – they anointed him. His numbers became holy writ, marking a pivotal moment in the ascent of American television. 

The Center of the Media Universe

The Nielsen ratings became the sun around all the planets of television revolved. Time slots, cancellations, renewals, writing, casting, and directing were all governed by the numbers. In the world of television, a high Nielsen rating meant job security; a low rating meant unemployment. 

With the Nielsen ratings as the shining beacon, the purpose of broadcasting was no longer to deliver programs to the viewers, but to deliver viewers to the advertisers.

In subtle ways, the ratings began to influence the content. In their quest for the highest ratings, the networks created programs with the broadest possible audience appeal, in effect programming for “the lowest common denominator.”  And that programming was increasingly targeted toward the coveted 18–49 demographic who bought the most of what the advertisers were selling.  

Nielsen’s hybrid system – the Audimeter-generated data combined with viewer diaries – remained the industry standard for decades, regardless of any lingering concerns about accuracy or reliability.

An improvement of sorts came in 1987, when Nielsen introduced the People Meter.  The upgrade from the decades-old Audimeter automated both tuning detection and viewer data. Each household member was assigned a button on a unit connected to the TV; viewers were instructed to press their button when they began watching and again when they stopped. This allowed Nielsen to collect demographic data in real time, reducing the reliance on memory and hand-written diaries. 

The New Frontiers

With its origins in the 1950s, Nielsen’s business was built for an industry dominated by three networks and a nationwide matrix of affiliated local stations. Ironically, the People Meter arrived just as that model reached its peak.

From the 1980s onward, television continued to evolve, and Nielsen has struggled to maintain its relevance – let alone the monopoly-like dominance it enjoyed for more than thirty years. 

The rapid growth of cable-TV in the 1980s fragmented the audience. Now the once mighty networks had to compete with dozens, then hundreds of niche cable channels. Nielsen responded by refining its sampling, increasing its reporting frequency, and tracking cable viewership.

The emergence of VCRs and DVRs further complicated the picture. Time-shifting threw a wrench in the basic premise of real-time audience measurement. Nielsen began tracking “live plus 3” and “live plus 7” metrics, accounting for those who watched within a few days of broadcast. But the genie was out of the bottle. Viewers were no longer tied to the broadcast schedule – or the ratings. 

With the dawn of viewing-on-demand services like Netflix, Nielsen devised tools to measure digital viewing, but the data is often incomplete or proprietary. Unlike broadcasters, streaming platforms don’t always publish their numbers, and when they do, they’re quite opaque. 

Nielsen has managed to endure and remains the industry standard for the network, local, and cable businesses now lumped together under the rubric of “linear” or “legacy” television. More recently, the company has begun to measure “total audience,” compiling a unified accounting across multiple platforms – broadcast, cable, and streaming.

Regardless of its future, Nielsen’s role in television’s ascent is indisputable. For more than 70 years, the fate of television programs, their creators, and the executives who scheduled them – has depended on what a relatively small group of households happened to be watching on a given night. That’s the peculiar legacy of the Nielsens: a quiet, methodical power broker whose black box helped build a golden age of television, even as it helped define the medium. 

Click here for an illustrated history of the A.C. Nielsen Company. 

Arthur Nielsen appeared on the TV Show What’s My Line in 1955:

 

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