Television & Ratings Data Resources
The Television and Ratings Data resource highlights relevant databases, sources, texts, and keywords for researching television ratings and data, along with information about prominent television rating resources, such as the Nielsen Ratings.
Statista
Statista provides statistical data on topics such as media, business, politics, society, technology, and education. The types of sources provided include market reports, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases. You can download charts as a PNG, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF. You can also embed data in web pages, papers, or presentations. For more information about Statista, explore the College of the Mainland's Statista Guide or watch Statista's introduction video below:
Video: Get started with Statista. Statista (2022).
MRI Simmons & Simmons OneView
Simmons Insights (formerly Simmons OneView, and prior to that Simmons Choices3) provides data on U.S. adult consumers based on national surveys. The data includes consumer demographics (age, gender, income, etc.), consumer psychographics (behavior, attitudes, etc.), and buying and media habits. The database can be used to create individualized reports for marketing strategies, advertising choices, and other business decisions. For more information, watch the introductory video below:
Video: Introducing Simmons Insights. MRI-Simmons (2018).
Television & Rating Resources
For historical ratings, use the International Television & Video Almanac. For current ratings, explore the following:
- COM Source
- Variety Ratings
- Television Explorer Search closed captions from the TV News Archive and create a visual dashboard.
- The Futon Critic
- Hollywood Reporter - Television Ratings
- Adweek TV Newser
- Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) Provides broadcast, subscription and syndication TV ratings delivery and analyses for the current season year as well as prior five seasons. Also includes breakdowns among age groups.
Keywords
- Cable Television
- Digital Media
- Educational Television
- Motion Picture Industry
- Network
- Streaming Television
- Teleprogramming
- Television
- Television Broadcasting/Programming/Station
- Viewer/Audience
Databases
- Television News Archive
Indexes evening broadcasts from ABC, ABC Nightline, CBS, CNN, NBC and PBS. Online video is available for CNN news broadcasts from 1999 to the present.
- Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text
Full-text and bibliographic coverage from scholarly and popular sources, spanning the entire spectrum of film and television studies.
Suggested Readings
Ratings Analysis by ISBN: 0805854096Publication Date: 2005-10-18Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research provides a thorough and up-to-date presentation of the ratings industry and analysis processes. It serves as a practical guide for conducting audience research, offering readers the tools for becoming informed and discriminating consumers of audience information, from broadcasting to cable to the World Wide Web. In its third edition, this essential volume: illustrates applications of audience research in advertising, programming, financial analysis, and social policy; describes audience research data and summarizes the history of audience measurement, the research methods most often used, and the kinds of ratings research products currently available; and discusses the analysis of audience data by offering a framework within which to understand mass media audiences and by focusing specifically to the analysis of ratings data.
Television and New Media: Must-Click TV by ISBN: 9780415802376Publication Date: 2010-08-30We watch TV on computers, phones, and other mobile devices; television is now online as much as it is "on air." Television and New Media introduces readers to the ways that new media technologies have transformed contemporary broadcast television production, scheduling, distribution, and reception practices. Drawing upon recent examples including Lost, 24, and Heroes, this book examines the ways that television programming has changed—transforming nearly every TV series into a franchise, whose on-air, online, and on-mobile elements are created simultaneously and held together through a combination of transmedia marketing and storytelling. Television studios strive to keep their audiences in constant interaction with elements of the show franchise in between airings not only to boost ratings, but also to move viewers through the different divisions of a media conglomerate. Organized around key industrial terms—platforming, networking, tracking, timeshifting, placeshifting, schedule-shifting, micro-segmenting, and channel branding this book is essential for understanding how creative and industrial forces have worked together to transform the way we watch TV.
Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV by ISBN: 9781441193988Publication Date: 2017-06-01Since 2010 "curation" has become a marketing buzzword. Wrenched from its traditional home in the world of high art, everything from food to bed linens to dog toys now finds itself subject to this formerly rarified activity. Most of the time the term curation is being inaccurately used to refer to the democratization of choice—an inevitable development and side effect of the economics of long tail distribution. Television on Demand examines what happens when curation becomes the primary way in which media users or viewers engage with mass media such as journalism, music, cinema, and, most specifically, television. Mass media's economic model is based on mass audiences—not a cornucopia of endless options from which individuals can customize their intake. The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the post-network television industry—one whose ultimate effects and outcomes remain unknown. Curatorial culture is a revolutionary new consumption ecology—one that the post-network television producers and distributors have not yet figured out how to monetize, as they remain in what anthropologists call a "liminal" state of a rite of passage—no longer what they used to be, but not yet what they will become.
Nielsen Ratings
What Are Nielsen Ratings?
Beginning in the 1950s, Arthur Charles (A.C.) Nielsen developed a system for rating the popularity of American television programs and series (Britannica, Nielsen Ratings). Nielsen Ratings:
- Measure the popularity of a variety of television programs in the United States market
- Indicate the audience size and composition of programming, but are not qualitative evaluations of whether or how much they are liked
Nielsen Research
- Nielsen Media Research Offers a number of resources, media research, and reports to help understand the media landscape as measured by Nielsen
- Nielsen Top 10
- Nielsen Report on Television 1979-1992/1993 Historical ratings resources
Citations and Further Reading
- Television & Media Management (Drexel University Libraries)
- American Television History (University of California Los Angeles)
- Finding Nielsen Ratings (Depaw University Libraries)
- Nielsen Ratings (Penn State University Libraries)
Other Ratings Resources
- Box Office MojoWorldwide statistics and rankings of box office revenues and data for films going back to 1980
- The Internet Movie Database: IMDbRatings and reviews for movies and TV shows across time
- MetacriticAggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games