Comments on: It’s official: Facebook is the 21st century Nielsen family

By: Kyle A.

Kyle A. — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:02:30 +0000

Datran Media’s Aperture has been doing this for nearly 3 years now…how can you say “Until now, if you were an advertiser and wanted to target your ad online to, say, males aged 18 to 34, the data available to you had some serious limitations.” It’s BS

By: Maarten

Maarten — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:14:30 +0000

Internet traffic is being counted after all, so I really don’t bother about the principle. However, assuming that the user is connected to facebook is a fundamental design flaw. I wonder how many iPad and iPhone users will be counted…

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:07:53 +0000

TV soaks up a huge amount of money because it can “absorb” a huge amount of money. It’s easy to drop $50m in a quarter on TV. Try doing that with online display ads. There’s a lot more overhead to online as well. So it’s very hyperbolic to suggest that big TV dollars will move online just because someone has a new means of showing audience demo.

By: Steve Evans

Steve Evans — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:44:53 +0000

The problem is, and this goes back to the Nielsen family TV panels, that Nielsen gets to choose the panel and the data segments that they measure stuff with.

In this way they have essentially been helping to control television programming for years through their carefully selected, not so representative TV panels.

I do wonder how good their data will be from Facebook. Will they use a cross section of data, anonymised across the whole of the FB userbase? Or will they carefully select which user profiles contribute to the data set of ratings.

Potentially dubious…

By: KidPhat

KidPhat — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 02:03:15 +0000

Ok, I don’t get the point to this. Since the data is pre-package before sending to Nielsen, how is that any different than Facebook providing the data directly? Also, is the data across various site or only Facebook.com?