Patent ID: 11887132
Assignee: THE NIELSEN COMPANY (US), LLC
Field: Audio-visual technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G  H

Claim 8:
9. An apparatus, comprising:
means for communicating to:
transmit first network communications to computing devices, the first network communications including cookies to be set on the computing devices, the cookies to facilitate tracking of accesses to media at the computing devices;

means for storing to:
store first records corresponding to first media impressions reported in second network communications from first ones of the computing devices, the first media impressions corresponding to user-identified impressions, the second network communications triggered by media collection instructions executed by the first ones of the computing devices that accessed the media, the communicating means to transmit redirect communications to instruct the first ones of the computing devices to send third network communications to a server of a database proprietor, the third network communications indicative of the accesses to the media at the first ones of the computing devices;
store second records corresponding to second media impressions reported in fourth network communications from second ones of the computing devices, the fourth network communications triggered by the media collection instructions executed by the second ones of the computing devices that accessed the media, a total count of the first and second requests corresponding to a total number of census impressions associated with the media, the second media impressions corresponding to unidentified impressions, the first and second requests including cookie information associated with the cookies set on the computing devices, the cookie information insufficient by itself to indicate census impression counts for different impression frequency intervals associated with the census impressions; and
store user-identified impression data corresponding to the user-identified impressions, the user-identified impressions obtained via a fifth network communication from the server of the database proprietor, the user-identified impressions generated by the database proprietor based on data aggregated from the third network communications from the first ones of the computing devices, the user-identified impressions associated with user-identified individuals for whom first demographic information is stored by the database proprietor, the user-identified impression data including a plurality of user-identified impression counts associated with corresponding ones of the impression frequency intervals; and

means for processing data to:
determine multipliers that relate a first probability distribution for the user-identified impressions to a second probability distribution for the census impressions, the multipliers based on census constraints defined by the total number of census impressions, determination of the multipliers to improve a computational efficiency of the processing means by eliminating a need to directly solve for all probabilities in the second probability distribution;
determine the census impression counts associated with the census impressions based on the multipliers, different ones of the census impression counts corresponding to different ones of the impression frequency intervals; and
generate a report based on the different ones of the census impression counts.