TV Ratings That Count

There's something very sweet and old-fashioned about Nielsen's TV ratings -- the idea that billions upon billions of dollars rests upon the viewing patterns of a sample of the U.S. population just tickles our funny bone.

TorrentFreak's sampling of top-ten TV downloads offers a slightly different perspective. While Nielsen feels weighted toward kindly grandparents, TorrentFreak's download rankings seem to be determined by the tastes of 18 to 25 year-old boys.

Case in point: The top five TV shows downloaded for the week of June 22 to June 29 were, according to TorrentFreak, "Top Gear," "Weeds," "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and "In Plain Sight."

(We looked at the week before last to approximate the lag time to Nielsen.)

Nielsen, by contrast, says the top broadcast TV shows for the week ended "July 30" (we're pretty sure they meant June 30) were: "America's Got Talent," "Criminal Minds," "CSI: NY," "48 Hours Mystery Tuesday" and "60 Minutes" -- or old people shows. The only overlap, as far as we could tell, was "In Plain Sight," which Nielsen ranked 4th among cable TV shows.

by Betsy Schiffman for Wired.com

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