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Late last week, as we pondered Nielsen's new plan to monitor all video content (as opposed to simply tracking what people watch on a television screen), Jason Miller over at WebProNews was engaged in a little Nielsen speculation of his own. His point is that Nielsen's expansive new strategy could come into conflict with Google's stated goal of organizing all the world's information. The Big G has something TV-related in the works, but it's not clear just what. After reading the tea leaves, Miller as an idea: Google might get into the TV-ratings biz.
"Interestingly, this can provide a whole new market for Google. The company will be able not only to extend its advertising offerings, but it suddenly will be able to foray in the media measurement market—a market that has been exclusively held by Nielsen."
Lucrative as such
foraying
might be, is this really a possibility or just another Groomer (that's Google rumor
to those not in the know)? The above-linked Google job posting aside, a paper cowritten by some Google researchers makes the idea sound a little less crazy, and even illustrates how it might work. Keep in mind that Google's approach to categorizing information is to prefer broad algorithmic solutions over approaches that require the company to, say, recruit a statistically meaningful pool of several thousand families who keep paper diaries of their TV watching or use special boxes that track their viewing.
