Guía para el uso de datos de audiencia Nielsen IBOPE México

gramming do affect the validity of factoring.
Guía para el uso de datos de audiencia
Factoring, however, applies most readily to a regional panel structure for mass audiences. It is no solution
for small area channels like cable or niche channels. Overall our solution to small sub-group audiences on
larger panels is to suggest that the sampling errors should be examined (as above), samples increased to
what is affordable and to accept that trading on spots for those sub-groups which cannot be measured
reliably will be unproductive.
Steps which can help are trading and appraisal in terms of schedules of spots and in appropriate cases,
factoring.
Viewing by Large Sub-Groups to Smaller Stations or Large Stations at Off-Peak Times
Put more simply this is the problem of small ratings on large panels. As competition increases, audiences
fragment and there are always:
stations which always have low ratings,
times when even large stations have low ratings.
This situation occurs increasingly within panels designed to measure mass audiences. Where stations are
restricted by access such as for satellite or cable, panels representative of those sub-sections of the universe
can be recruited.
In the United Kingdom, homes with satellite or cable are broken out of the main panel and weighted as a
network satellite panel. This provides around 1200 households and 3600 individuals, without any additional
boosting.
Such is the fragmentation within these homes however, that many stations record permanently low weekly
audiences. These data are robust within satellite homes for the terrestrial channels, for total Sky and
other aggregations of channels. Some channels, however, regularly record an average of one or two minutes
of viewing per head each week. In a sense these figures are reliable in that they always show very low
audiences week after week.
Where the problems arise, for all channels, is when individuals spots or programmes are considered. For
many of the larger satellite stations, even within the satellite universe, many ratings at individual times
are 1% or less, often 0.1% or less.
The sampling errors on these are enormous. For example, consider the largest satellite channel in the United
Kingdom. Amongst all housewives this channel took a 4.5% share of all viewing in satellite receiving
homes in a recent week (week ending 25th January 1998). (Note that the next largest satellite channel
took only a 2.6% share.) In this particular week, two-thirds of this channel’s programmes had housewife
ratings of 1% or less and one-third had housewife ratings of 0.1% or less. The 95% confidence intervals
on housewife ratings of 1% and 0.1% in satellite homes are 60% and 180% respectively. (Again these
sampling errors assume the panel to be perfectly balanced; in reality they are larger.)
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