pinebarrens
CAGiversary!
When I was in college I was renting a house with a couple guys and Nielson called and asked if we would be a Nielson household. They paid us a couple hundred bucks for our trouble.
The technician came out and installed the stuff and told us that as long as we didn't keep it on any one channel for more than 30 seconds, then the show would not receive "ratings" from us. This led to strange TV watching habits, like watching parts of shows that we deemed as unworthy for 20 seconds at a time. Certain networks were banned from being watched in the house. Sometimes the TV would get left on while we were gone just to give a show we liked ratings (Adult Swim got a lot of love that year).
Our technician told us that we weren't supposed to tell anyone we had Nielson boxes in our house, but we all told our friends anyway. I saw our technician at a bar a few months later and introduced him to my friends as "my Nielson guy". He was not happy with me.
My roommate even hatched a plot to have TV networks pay him off to watch their shows. He never got any further than taking polaroids of the Nielson boxes off the backs of the TVs. I can't remember how many households we actually represented. Anyone else ever been a Nielson house?
The technician came out and installed the stuff and told us that as long as we didn't keep it on any one channel for more than 30 seconds, then the show would not receive "ratings" from us. This led to strange TV watching habits, like watching parts of shows that we deemed as unworthy for 20 seconds at a time. Certain networks were banned from being watched in the house. Sometimes the TV would get left on while we were gone just to give a show we liked ratings (Adult Swim got a lot of love that year).
Our technician told us that we weren't supposed to tell anyone we had Nielson boxes in our house, but we all told our friends anyway. I saw our technician at a bar a few months later and introduced him to my friends as "my Nielson guy". He was not happy with me.
My roommate even hatched a plot to have TV networks pay him off to watch their shows. He never got any further than taking polaroids of the Nielson boxes off the backs of the TVs. I can't remember how many households we actually represented. Anyone else ever been a Nielson house?