Twitter now included in Nielson's TV Rating System

[TrueBlitz]

http://marketingland.com/nielsens-tw...ember-30-59527

Nielsen will launch its Twitter TV Ratings on September 30, giving television networks and advertisers the first industry-standard metric for second-screen viewership.

It looks like the TV industry is slowly moving towards the internet to rely on ratings. I think it's great that people who don't have cable and watches via streaming will now use this system to support their favorite shows.

I also noticed Adult Swim is live streaming their channel and will also add towards TV ratings:

http://video.adultswim.com/watch-live/

What do you think guys? Do you think this is a first step towards legal internet streaming and abandoning cable all together? Or is this asking for major abuse with Twitter bots spamming tweets everywhere (idk how Twitter manages their tweets so I'm not quite sure of this).

[Jedward]

Sharknado becomes #1 in ratings.

Just think about how absurd that is.

Serious answer: It's great if used correctly. I'm not sure Twitter is the best measure of how many people watch a certain something, but it's pretty damn good. I'm not sure if Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services count right now (but they really should). The internet is ever-changing, so I don't think Nielsen will ever find a suitable way to measure ratings, but I'm willing to give them props for trying so hard.

[VerrKol]

This seems like a great idea and horrid execution. Why not simply count users watching Hulu, Netflix, and other legitimate streaming sources? I'm certain these sites already keep logs of how many people are watching which show so it should be a simple process to buy that information (or make it conditional to them streaming your show) then simply include it with regular cable viewers. You're not getting money from people watching it illegally so those don't count.

This is just asking for abuse from spam bots and such.