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speedracer
Bending Unit
  
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« #74 : 07-29-2010 03:29 »
« : 07-29-2010 03:42 »
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Week-to-week fluctuations in Nielsen ratings of this size are pretty meaningless.
According to sO's figures, 1 Nielsen box = about 20,000 viewers, so this means Futurama appears on about 100 Nielsen boxes every week (2 million viewers). There are 25,000 live Nielsen boxes right now, according to Wikipedia.
With these figures, you'd expect the standard deviation to be about 10 Nielsen boxes per week, or 200,000 viewers. This probably should be cut down a little bit, because TV viewers don't conform to a uniform Bernoulli distribution, but the general point that these rating fluctuations are mostly random noise still holds.
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speedracer
Bending Unit
  
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« #79 : 07-31-2010 12:58 »
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This Nielsen system is a bit foreign to be (being a foreigner and all), but 25k boxes * 20k viewers/box = 500m viewers seems a bit high.
From Rebirth's numbers I arrive at around 6,500 viewers/box if I don't get the Nielsen system wrong: Rebirth had 2.923 m viewers and a 1.8/3 household rating. If 1 Nielsen household = 1 box and if 25,000 boxes exist, then 25,000 * 1.8% = 450 boxes were switched to Futurama. That would result in 2.923m / 450 = 6,495 viewers/box. With the numbers from other episodes, I arrive at around 5,000 viewers/box. No idea if some of the assumptions are wrong or if I'm misinterpreting one of the figures...
Still not a great sample size.
Well, I guess we're implicitly assuming that the average # of people per Futurama-watching household = average # of people in any household and that that stays constant, but that's not really a huge deal. The true number of Nielsen boxes tuned in to Futurama is still only on the order of a couple hundred. The standard deviation is approximately equal to the square root of the number of Nielsen boxes, so it's always going to be pretty big. 2.1 million +/- 200,000 seems a pretty accurate range for the Futurama viewership in the USA (discounting the season premiere, which was always going to be higher). It's not steadily losing viewers as it did its first couple seasons on FOX.
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