Nielsen Media Research announced a half-dozen clients Monday for the upcoming
rollout of its local "People Meter" service.
Of its planned top-10-market rollout, Nielsen said, its local People Meter
will start next year in Los Angeles (in "early 2004"), New York, Chicago and San
Francisco.
Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, will
join the list in 2005, followed by Atlanta in 2006.
The initial clients supporting its local People Meters, Nielsen said, will be
the ABC- and NBC-owned TV stations, as well as Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable
in New York and Los Angeles and Adlink, the Los Angeles interconnect. (Local
People Meter service began in Boston last year.)
The new meters -- which will enable clients to get demographic ratings
overnight, rather than waiting for sweeps periods -- will replace the current
set-meter/diary measurement system in the top 10 markets, which Nielsen
estimated as reaching nearly 32 million television households, or 30 percent of
all U.S. TV homes.
More than $10 million annually is spent on local TV alone across those top 10
markets, Nielsen added.
Nielsen reiterated Monday that its national People Meter sample will be
nearly doubled to almost 10,000 households when that expansion is completed in
2006, as part of its reported $400 million-plus, seven-year contract with NBC
and its cable siblings.
