Facebook Delivers Viewer Engagement Reports To TV Networks 45
cagraham writes "Facebook has started delivering custom weekly reports to select TV networks, detailing the total amount of social interactions related to individual TV episodes.According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is using its data analytics to track the amount of times an episode is liked, shared, or mentioned each week. The data is then anonymized and delivered to networks. This comes a week after Twitter announced they were pursuing deals with major networks as well. Facebook may be trying to establish itself as a modern alternative to the traditional Nielsen ratings system, the current benchmark for gauging viewership."
Breaking Bad (Score:5, Funny)
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You need to find new friends.
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Why? People who like Breaking Bad are already the kind of friends you want.
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Ummmm... watching one of the best shows ever rather than reality TV is GOOD thing. They might actually be people worth knowing.
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For the first season or two I may have agreed with you somewhat. Wouldn't call it the 'best show ever', but it was decent.
But now? I stopped watching during the last season when I noticed that for the past season or two they'd been adding new characters every episode just to then kill them off on the next episode. Hallmark of a show that's run out of ideas and is devolving into a daytime soap. About time they ended it.
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I had never even heard of Breaking Bad until the last few weeks when suddenly a stupid television show became front page news. Must be a slow news month, or more likely standards have just hit a new low for what passes as "news" these days.
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According to my feed, half the planet downloaded it from eztv.it.
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Never seen it.
Don't fucking care.
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Has anyone made a "Breaking Bad in 5 seconds" video? I'd like to see that. I've never seen the show, since I don't pay for TV; but I've been around someone who was enthusiastic about it. So far, just from the incredible bleed over into popular culture I've surmisd that the 5 second video would go something like this: WW: OMG, I've got cancer. I've got to provide for my family. (cut to scene of meth lab) (cut to various scenes of people getting shot and stuff) (cut to scene where WW dies) (cut to scen
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TLDR, way better than Darth f'n Vader in Star Wars.
It's more of a cautionary tale. The main character is freed from a measure of fear of consequences by certain death and uses his chemist knowledge to make a quick buck to pay the bills. But it turns out, being really smart makes him quite good at being a badguy. Being masterful at something is seductive and he slides into the evil while justifying his actions, always viewing himself as the hero. But in the end he realizes the truth.
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Nah, maybe add in the middle: "I'm your boss now, never forget who you ---!" then the guy gets shot mid-sentence and the sequence repeats with someone else. A dozen times or so. And a few dozen repetitions of 'OH CRAP WE'RE BUSTED DUMP EVERYTHING' in steadily increasing levels of insanity too.
Who gives a fuck? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, marketing research groups could be gleaning this kind of data from Slashdot too if they wanted to but no one gives a fuck. How much do people know about you from your Slashdot profile? Only as much as you let them know. Why are "social network" sites held up to a different standard?
Re:Who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, marketing research groups could be gleaning this kind of data from Slashdot too if they wanted to but no one gives a fuck. How much do people know about you from your Slashdot profile? Only as much as you let them know. Why are "social network" sites held up to a different standard?
Well, I suspect that I'm talking to a particularly belligerent wall here; but somebody else might read it: 'social' networks are explicitly and fundamentally, designed to produce profiles based both on what you provide and what people you have real-world connections with provide (eg. people who don't even have facebook accounts; but are still tagged and machine-visioned in the image libraries of people who do). Your Slashdot-type profile is probably more vulnerable to a clever analyst than casual inspection would suggest; but the value of information provided by 3rd parties on the system about you is overwhelmingly lower, leaving the question of how 'knowable' you are much more in your hands.
Also, of course, 'real name' policies are a fairly obvious attempt to both extirpate dupes and ACs (presumably because the quality of discussion is already low enough, and because uniques with attached data are worth more as eyeballs); but also quash pseudonyms in the process. Again, many pseudonyms are vulnerable to clever or sustained attack; but in casual use they allow the virtues of consistent 'characters' to emerge (Yeah, that guy, he impersonates a fungus on the internet. Fucked if I know...); but leaves it up to you whether to connect that to other parts of your life or not. Some people use pseudonyms; some use pseudonyms by preference but make little or no effort to hide who they are, some post under their real names, up to you.
**way** better than Nielsen's method (Score:3)
You have to understand...as of **right now** the overarching, decades old industry-standard is the Nielsen Ratings.
Avail yourself of the wikipedia page on it and you will be enlightened.
Ex: Nielsen's standard method is to have viewers in each room with a TV enter their presence on a remote and this is what **Billions** of dollars of ad revenue, the decisions to 'renew' ever single TV show we've ever love...
all of these vital decisions...Left to b
Snapplization (Score:2)
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"America's Got Talent" is a giant advert in itself for Syco Enterprises ie. Simon Cowells productions, it just hasnt taken the FCC/ASA to wake up yet
Nielsen must be freaking out (Score:3)
But the data would not be terribly pure for two reasons. If a show like breaking bad(with a youngish audience) were to hire a team of social media gurus and create many incentives to blah blah about the show then they will generate far more buzz per viewer than say Murder She Wrote reruns will generate per viewer both due to the age of the viewers and assuming that Murder She Wrote isn't hiring a crack team of social media experts.
So where this will really blow up is when a crap show completely games social media and then drinks their own cool aid thinking their show is a social media hit. But I have never met an MBA who didn't like the taste of their own urine.
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That was just the right length of post to say that Breaking Bad is even less worth watching than a Murder She Wrote re-run.
Re:Nielsen must be freaking out (Score:4, Insightful)
Where does the exhaustive sample of 'Nielson households' fit in here?
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Not really. Neilsen does live tracking because they're the most likely to watch the ads. PVR, Hulu, pirate, Netflix results don't really matter as they don't affect ad revenues. Neilsen is about ads.
Unless you're talking about a premium channel like HBO which gets all its revenue through subscription revenue, in which case alternat
Re:Nielsen must be freaking out (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do networks love it when people comment online in realtime? if someone is sending tweets or posting on Facebook then the show is not holding their attention. Unless they are waiting for the ad breaks to post online, in which case they are not paying attention to the advertisers.
Not Scientific Sample (Score:3, Insightful)
Networks want people to watch their shows so those same people watch commercials. They want ratings from Nielsen so they have a well respected third party estimating the eyeballs each commercial gets to justify advertising rates. Facebook's report doesn't provide that.
Besides, this is clearly a self-selecting sample. There may be some tiny value to the networks in assessing popularity, but Nielsen Ratings will still remain king because they actually attempt to identify "C+3 ratings", the number of viewers who watch commercials within three days, via random sampling.
Better spoiler (Score:2)
Hank builds a robot. It terminates his enemies.
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before they are born! maybe?
Does this account for FB thumbs-downs? (Score:4, Interesting)
The old saying is that if you had a good experience you'll tell one person but if you have a bad experience you'll tell ten. Does this system take the word "sucked" after the name of a program into account? Because if networks think that everyone's watching Stupid Sitcom because people have been talking about how inane the commercials make it out to be, they're missing the point. Nielsen monitors how many people change the channel, while going by Facebook results (by tally, not by content) doesn't represent those click-offs.
Not that I care if a network making a crappy show thinks it's hot shit or anything, but they could be giving more airtime to underrated good shows rather than putting more emphasis on lousy shows everyone's dissing on.
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They might end up overrating shows like Honey BooBoo or Jersey Shore that end up as targets for mockery, but in general people just ignore shows they don't watch.
I think the risk with this system is they need a very good understanding of the show's demographic to understand the numbers since a lot of people post nothing about the shows they watch while others blab about everything.
They also need to understand why people are posting. People talked about Breaking Bad a lot because it was so good, and they als
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They also need to understand why people are posting. People talked about Breaking Bad a lot because it was so good, and they also talked about Dexter because it got so bad. When good shows drop in quality hard core fans stick around but start to complain. So you could conceivably get an uptick in chatter that instead of signalling a rise in ratings actually precedes a drop in ratings.
Enter Sentiment Analysis [1]. Even a word-count analysis of positive/negative connotation words vs. a neutral sentiment control corpus could tell you with a reasonably high accuracy whether a show is being slagged or praised. And that's a simplistic guess of a prediction model from someone with a single machine learning course to brag about - nothing like using Google's prediction API.
[1] https://developers.google.com/prediction/docs/sentiment_analysis [google.com]
About time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Privacy issues aside, this can only be a good thing. The Nielsen system has been responsible for the death of many a good show before its time.
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public shaming... hmm i like where this is headed, i wonder how many people admit to liking certain reality shows?
There is a problem with "viewership" (Score:2)
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I would hope DVRs count for something for a basic cable tv show, They are paying for cable vs free broadcast. I missed the Sunday show at Brewvies in SLC and watched on Xfinity.comcast.net in the morning before work.
Hitler Parodies (Score:1)
This might make Downfall (Der Untergang) and Hitler the most popular movie and character of all time!! The horors