Nielsen
 

Anybody here ever been a Nielsen Family?

We've done it twice; once in 1988, and again last year.

g/f and I were one ... she signed upn while on hiatus from the entertainment industry... we didn't tell them and had it for a couple of years. It was neat... espcially since they paid for our cable bill.. at least some of it...

Definitely neat to represent about 10,000 people. Sometimes I'd leave the TV on random stations of shows that I didn't necessarily like when I was surfing just to make it interesting.

How do you become a Nielsen family?
Do you sign up for it or what?
Cause I've been wondering how all those people can consistantly put the worst shows in the top ten.

The two times it happened to us, they contacted us out of the blue by mail. They sent us a postcard that told us what to expect, and when we would be receiving our material. It all looks like total junk mail, so I'll bet a lot of folks throw it out without reading.

what are some of the pros and cons of being a nielson family and where do you sign up?

I was one foir awhile. Got a nice $50 check from them every few months. The kicker is I haven't watched more than an hour of TV ever since I moved into my current apartment :) I don't think there's a way to just sign up for it, I think they contact people at random, that's how they got me.

Pros:
the subsidize your cable bill
you get to represent 10,000 households

cons:
they open up and modify all your TVs/VCRs/DVD/VideoGames
they use your phone line in the middle of the night (overnight dial up phone hoggers beware because it has to call out nightly)
you have to answer some demographic related questions

How? They solicit you. If you move, which is how we stopped being one, they then solicited the next person who moved in. They want to keep a sample within the same areas.

All we had to do was keep a daily written journal (which they provided).

You didn't have guys in black suits, dark glasses, and communications wires in their ears installing your equipment, did you? Hmmm.

nope... it was all tracked electronically this was 1999-2000. They sent over some technicians that came over and modded our stuff, there were some black boxes that hung off the back of the sets that collected data, this allowed them to track our habits such as we would watch raw cable (no scrambler box direct from wall to TV) while recording HBO from the cable box to one of the VCRs

If we had to keep a log... we'd never have done it.