Why do people still use Nielsen Rating system when its incredibly inaccurate?

[thetonestarr]

scottie said:

bobgamez said:

THey literrally take only 5,000 people in the USA and give them a ratings box, and make an educated guess as to how many people watch the show. Um really?  THats what we use in this day and Age for the life and death of tv shows? Why doesn't everyone who owns a tv get a ratings box? It would make it, you know, actually accurate.

I just dont understand why everyone still uses this dumbass system. Any guesses why we still use it?

5000 is actually quite a decent sample size.

 

Taking an example, calculated using this because I can't remember the formula exactly, if the results of the survey are 10% of the 5000 people watch a show, then you can be 95% sure that somewhere between 9.17% and 10.83%  of the 311 million people in the USA watch it.

 

http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

 

Edit: This is all assuming that the 5000 people are chosen randomly. I can't say whether this is true or not.

Those 5000 people obviously aren't chosen randomly, though. They specifically choose people who say they watch broadcast TV. So it's only accurate among Americans who watch broadcast TV. And since they don't know the percentage of Americans who actually watch broadcast TV, they can't accurately gauge anything off of that.