Nielsen-NetRatings Tries Change

The speed at which technology changes can quickly spell the doom of the products made by entrenched companies. Nielsen-NetRatings is changing their rating system of web pages to include the time spent on the page in addition to how many times it is viewed. Nielsen adds time spent on sites to Web rankings But they failed to adapt fast enough to stay in the rating business for movie box office data. This Google Techtalk by a developer at Rentrack. Is your RDBMS letting you down? Applications of TV Viewing Behavior mentions how Rentrack introduced faster and greater detail for movie box offices and in one year had taken the rating business of all but one major studio from Nielsen. I am reminded of the movie Antitrust (2001) with Tim Robbins where he says that anyone in their garage can come up with a product and put him out of business. Rentrack’s product was not built in a garage, but it was a small scale project that led to a major improvement in technology.