The politics and practice of television ratings conventions: Australian and American approaches to broadcast ratings

Abstract

As we now know, once you introduce audience ratings, as China has done, you have not just introduced ‘a measure’; you have introduced a huge apparatus that brings with it certain types of agreements, values and behaviours. No doubt, China's leaders saw the ratings as a neutral mechanism in mapping broadcast audiences. The history of ratings, however, is quite the opposite. It is a set of standards, values and conventions that drives particular kinds of expectations in organizations, technology and content. Audience ratings first provided a coordination rule for advertiser-supported media and then became a convention, harnessed by TV to change media economics. In this paper the authors provide an insight into how audience ratings, as a convention – a compact – emerged in Australia and America, and some of the major differences between them.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the assistance from Helen Crossley, Ian Garland, Ian McNair and Gale Metzger and their insights into the history of audience ratings. The authors also wish to thank Mark Neely, part of a family involved in the development of early Australian ratings system, for access to Nielsen's Australian archives. The interviews and research were made possible by funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) project ‘The Emergence, Development and Transformation of Media Ratings Conventions and Methodologies, 1930–2008’. The authors thank the reviewers for their useful comments.