1980 1,700 audiometer homes and a rotating board of nearly 850 diary respondents
1985 Nielsen meters TV viewing in more than 5,500 U.S. homes
2003 Nielsen doubles its national TV sample from 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. households
2014 Nielsen has installed electronic devices known as “people meters” in 16,916 homes
2017 A Nielsen rep personally told me, this very afternoon, that there are about 17,000 Nielsen
2019 approximately 46,000 households nationwide
2021 Nielsen ... among its almost 60,000 active
2022 National TV panel reached 42,000 households
2023 Nielsen uses several sampling procedures, but its main one is to track the viewing patterns of about 20,000 households
Looks like in the nineties they had ~5K sample points.
It’s not just about how many people watched certain TV shows, it is that people who didn’t own or watch TV would know about such shows through daily conversations.
as defined by Nielsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research#Ratings...
Looks like in the nineties they had ~5K sample points.