Audience ratings were born from mechanical devices that sampled what households tuned into

Evidence

Nielsen bought out Elder and his partner, Louis Woodruff, and six years later he had developed a working prototype of his own “black box”; once installed in the home of a family (who were paid for their trouble), it would measure exactly what they were tuning in to. One by one, Nielson sent out his black boxes (which came to be called “people meters”), each one like a nerve ending into the body public, slowly creating a vast network that would tell him just how Americans were spending their evening hours. Thus were modern ratings born, becoming in the words of one expert “a feedback mechanism to the industry the same way that the human nervous system is to the human body.” If the United States would now have a nervous system collecting information on the apportionment of attention, Nielsen would be its brain. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader attention-industry narrative of measurement infrastructure enabling the commercial attention harvest. — connects to: Audience measurement ceded programming control to ratings rather than taste or decency — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 494; Networks quantified audience attention as inventory sold by gross rating points — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 489; Early broadcasters saw audience size as the key to advertising profit — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 342

Broader Connections

• Networks quantified audience attention as inventory sold by gross rating points #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 489
• Early broadcasters saw audience size as the key to advertising profit #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 342
• Audience measurement ceded programming control to ratings rather than taste or decency #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 494