Ask a typical college student what his or her favorite show is and many will reply with two letters: \OC"" While groups of students flock to their TVs each week to watch it, FOX often has to fight to compete against networks with more mature audiences.
Shows like FOX's ""The OC"" and ABC's ""The Bachelor,"" with their intense situations and relatable characters, appeal to large groups of college students. While these shows are often the center of student TV-viewing parties and can draw large crowds, their ratings indicate their viewership is weak and they continuously fail to make it into the top twenty, which is typically dominated by more adult-geared programming.
""A bunch of my friends and I have to get together every week to watch 'The Bachelor.' We don't go a week without watching it or else we'll miss everything,"" UW-Madison sophomore Mai Lor said. ""For 'The OC' it's even a bigger deal. We have food and everything.""
To measure ratings, Nielsen Media Research Inc. randomly selects households and measures the television shows watched on a regular basis. Nielsen then releases the statistics to the public. These statistics provide valuable information for networks and often determine which shows are cancelled and which stay on air.
With so many students watching these shows, it would seem their ratings would reflect their popularity. However, no matter how many students on campus get together to watch a show, their viewing is not measured since Nielsen ratings do not take into account viewing on college campuses.
""[Nielsen] households have people-meters installed to gauge when the TV is on, what channel is being watched and, in some cases, who is watching,"" said UW-Madison Professor of Journalism Douglas McLeod. ""Because college households are transitory, they are not going to be selected as Nielsen households.""
Not only do college students cause difficulties by continually changing residences, but colleges would have to invite companies like Nielsen to come and install meters.
""There are a lot of reasons why colleges haven't been taken into account,"" said Laura James, vice president of client communication at Nielsen. ""We have to get permission to come onto campus to meter television sets.""
Without the inclusion of college viewing, many argue Nielsen ratings are based on an unrepresentative population and produce bias statistics. But to counter this criticism, Nielsen Media has been working to extend the ""Nielsen household.""
""We just finished a test of looking at viewing on college campuses-we call it 'extended-home,'"" James said. ""We looked at college students who were part of already existing Nielsen homes and metered their viewing, which includes visitor viewing.""
James said the study received positive feedback, especially from networks like MTV that would benefit from the plan's implementation. However, the plan's logistics-its cost, when it would begin and how data would be gathered-have yet to be integrated into the current system Nielsen uses to gather ratings information. Until then, college viewers will go unaccounted for in the ratings.
