A plaintive call from Australia’s TV executives was heard just after nine o’clock on Friday morning. “Come out, wherever you are … just come home … please, there’s millions of dollars riding on your return”.
So far no answer as the Great Australian TV Ratings Mystery continues for the third morning in a row. At this point it’s almost a miniseries. Call it My Ratings Rule. House Ratings. I’m A TV Rating, Get Me Out of This Box. Or maybe MasterTheft: Who Burned The Ratings?
The TV ratings for Thursday joined those from Tuesday and Wednesday in cyber limbo (or purgatory) as Nielsen, the company that collects and collates the data, struggles to get its system back online after a ransomware attack earlier this week.
That means measurements of Big Brother’s final shows, Bachelor in Paradise and last night’s NRL and AFL games remain, well, a mystery, stuck as they are in the thousands of ratings meters in panel homes (and apartments, townhouses, etc) across the country, in both metro and regional markets.
While the meters have storage capacity (as do the reference sites), three complete days is an awful lot of data to be holding untransmitted. And there’s more coming down the pipeline. According to OzTam, which is owned by the free-to-air networks and provides official TV ratings data, there won’t be anything from Nielsen until next Wednesday at the earliest.
A case of digital indigestion looms? Stay tuned.
Another addition to the list of dodgy or sub-optimal data sets used to inform Australia…..
This includes sub-optimal or down right misrepresentation of data or simply disappearing, if inconvenient for a PR narrative i.e. real estate sales, auction clearance rates etc. (prices always go up or represent good value) and spiky or seemingly high population data through increased conflation of temporary residents in 2006 (fitting white nativist narratives).
Of related concern, the majority of Australians lack basic financial (data) literacy…… while our legacy industries avoid innovation and cling to ‘ownership’ of political parties and MPs, hoping for a sustained future….
For National Disability Insurance Scheme check https://ndis.registeredprovider.com.au/