Currently the results are delivered in less than 12 hours. Competition and measurement technology accelerated together. By the late 70's, newspapers listed the week's top 10 shows. Market analysts and major investors used the numbers to buy and sell stock in TV networks and production companies. All this attention echoed back to the network board rooms in the form of still more intense competition.
Most producers are skeptical or hostile.
Many blackand Hispanic critics in the country believe the Nielsen sample under-representsminorities because Neilsen employees are afraid to go into the ghettos. Nielsen doesn't measure viewers' satisfaction, just the number of eyeballs watching a program. The sample Nielsen uses is small. Common sense, ignorant of the theory of statistical sampling, finds it impossible to believe that so few viewers can represent the entire TV nation. If Nielsen's methods have a flaw, it is not the size of the sample, but in how the sample fails to accurately represent the totalpopulation of the country.