July 2017 NPD Thread! Switch #1

[librarian13579]

Nuvendil said:

CosmicSex said:
As a consumer, I don't like the secret nature of hiding sales. Japan has released numbers for years and no one blew up. Here it seems to protectionist. After all, as consumers, we are the ones generating this information. It is ours literally.

I mean I don't like it either, but NPD is a research group that formulates these estimates so no, we don't strictly speaking generate this data.  They aren't counting every single sale individually. 

You can take the "estimate" part with a grain of salt. It's pretty much just straight sales data.

This is how it works:

1) Every month, NPD gets direct, point-of-sale transaction data from all of the major retailers and all of their online websites. That's 95% of the market.

2) Then, NPD gets direct data from another 2% of smaller retailers.

3) The remaining 3% NPD estimates with algorithms.

We as consumers collectively generate 97% of NPD's data, so I do feel like it's something we should have access to.

A long long time ago, we used to get some direct data....before a retailer / a few third-parties started complaining, that is.