Media scholars have for long complained about the lack of good measures of media use. Survey self-reports have been shown to be notoriously unreliable, especially for news, where there is significant over-reporting, and without good measures, research lags. The same is true for most research in marketing.
Until recently, the state of the art aggregate media use measures were Nielsen ratings, which put a `meter’ in a few households, or asked people to keep a diary of what they saw. In short, the aggregate measures were pretty bad as well. Digital media, which allows for effortless tracking, and the rise of Internet polling however for the first time provides an opportunity to create `panels’ of respondents for whom we have near perfect measures of media use. The proposal is quite simple: create a hybrid of Nielsen on steroids and YouGov/Polimetrix or Knowledge Network kind of recruiting of individuals.
Logistics: Give people free cable and Internet (~ 80/month) in return for 2 hours of their time per month and monitoring of media consumption. Pay people who already have cable (~100/month) for installing a device and software. Recording channel information is enough for TV, but Internet equivalent of a channel—domain—clearly isn’t, as people can self-select within websites. So we only need to monitor the channel for TV but more for the Internet.
While the number of devices on which people browse the Internet, and watch TV has multiplied, there generally remains only one `pipe’ per house. We can install a monitoring device at the central hub for cable, and automatically install software for anyone who connects to the Internet router or do passive monitoring on the router. Monitoring can also be done through applications on mobile devices.
Monetizability: Consumer companies (say Kellog’s, Ford), Communication researchers, Political hacks (e.g. how many watched campaign ads) will all pay for it. The crucial innovation (modest) is the addition of the possibility to survey people on a broad range of topics, in addition to getting great media use measures.
Addressing privacy concerns:
- Limit recording information to certain channels/websites, ones on which customers advertise, etc. This changing list can be made subject to approval by the individual.
- Provide for a web-interface where people can look/suppress the data before it is sent out. Of course, reconfirm that all data is anonymous to deter such censoring.
Ensuring privacy may lead to some data censoring and we can try to prorate the data we get it a couple of ways –
- Survey people on media use
- Use Television Rating Points (TRP) by sociodemographics to weight data.