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  • 2017-01-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Can TV Viewers Protest Donald Trump's Inauguration by Changing the Channel? (en)
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  • A call-to-action message that urged television viewers to watch anything other than Donald Trump's inauguration on 20 January 2017 in an attempt to lower the event's TV ratings (and thus strike a blow to the President-elect's ego) was widely circulated on Facebook: However, a boycott scheme similar to the described above would likely not be very effective regardless if whether viewers had their televisions turned on, off, or changed to something other than Inauguration Day news coverage. The largest stumbling block to this plan is the assumption that each individual's personal viewership affects a given television program's ratings. This simply isn't the case — unless, of course, that individual is a member of a Nielsen family. The Nielsen Company gathers data to determine the ratings of television programs, and while the company employs a variety of methods to collect their data (especially in this relatively new age of Internet streaming), the most common method is via Nielsen families: Nielsen households are randomly selected as a representative sample of the TV-viewing population of the United States: Since Nielsen uses these selected families to determine television ratings, the viewing habits of most people (who are not members of a Nielsen family) go largely unrecorded. Vulture reporter Margaret Lyons addressed this issue in a 2015 Q&A: As of August 2016, there were about 40,000 Nielsen households, representing a total of 118.4 million TV-viewing households, in the United States. Steve Krakauer added more detail about how Nielsen ratings were determined in a 2015 post on Autonomous: Although Nielsen isn't the only company that compiles TV ratings, they are the company that has the most influence over the purchase of television advertisements: It should also be noted that the way consumers watch television, and the way that Nielsen collects is data, has changed in recent years. For instance, the company inked a deal with DISH Network in April 2016 to incorporate DISH's set-top boxes into its data. However, this deal was primarily focused on enhancing Nielsen's data from small, local markets: As Nielsen's data is largely drawn from Nielsen families, a non-Nielsen family member's individual viewing (or lack thereof) of Donald Trump's inauguration would have virtually no impact on the event's overall television ratings. (en)
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