Nielsen ratings are about to go through a change. The measuring of how many people watch a show and its ads is perhaps the most important deciding factor on whether a show is successful and whether it stays on air.

It's also, as this article shows, wildly behind the times and mostly inaccurate. No surprises there!

The company  is now rolling out a new effort to understand viewership a little better. They still measure viewership with a little black box that is given to random families, which records their viewing choices. But now that more people are watching TV online and over the internet, the black box itself becomes less accurate.

Nielsen cannot track Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime and doesn't track illegal torrents or streams either. It also doesn't track on-demand cable viewing or purchases from iTunes. The solution: Twitter.

Nielsen and Twitter announced a joint effort to scrounge up analytics based on Twitter chatter around TV shows. It is primarily a measure of how much engagement a TV show has. It will take a look at the reaction of the show, and how much people talk about it and how much they follow the stars or creators.

The process is actually harder than it sounds. Figuring out if people are talking about a show is tough, and there's a larger question of whether Twitter is representative of the larger viewing audience.

Lets see how this affects ratings over all in the time to come.

[via NYTimes]