freqfreak2 wrote:After decades of doing so why are the ratings services no longer making any data public? What changed?
As Abba once sang, "Money Money Money."
You want it? You pay for it. Gotta love capitalism.
It is about capitalism but more about control. Numeris is run basically by the CAB, subscribing stations and ad agencies. They try to portray that the public isn't really that interested in ratings which is just a cover. Other countries like the US, UK, Australia and all through Europe make radio and TV ratings available to media and the public. In some cases on a daily basis with overnight TV ratings.
This is one reason why we don't see lot of rating information or stories in newspapers other than from the US. I live in the east and it used to bug me why the Toronto Star and Sun for about a year would always list the top 10 or 20 shows in the US but never any ratings from Canada. Our top 20 shows are usually quite a bit different than the US. This has been especially evident over the past few years. However the Numeris numbers for TV were always a week old because this is what they released to the public.
Interesting as well when Numeris dropped the release of limited ratings to the public at the end of August, they also made unavailable the old radio and TV archive rating information. Why would they do this suddenly? Again controlling the information and message. We wouldn't want anyone to be able and compare the numbers today to fifteen years ago.
Here is a recent article from the Globe and Mail which asks why ratings are so secret in Canada...
https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.t ... ve-nature/