If you don’t know who Nielsen is they’re basically the people who know everything. They know exactly how many people bought the first Harry Potter (a shmillion), how many people tuned in to watch Peyton Manning lose the Super Bowl (many millions), and how many people bought Heidi Montag’s solo album (like, 5, including her husband). They’re basically media statistic gods. I heard that they used to have a random selection of American households who they gave a clicker to, and members of the home would click in every time they watched TV. However they do it, they know their stuff. At least, I thought they did until now. Somehow, the intern e-mail address over here at Beaufort is on their mailing list, and they sent us a very interesting update to whoever cares about random media statistics. I will share an excerpt:
“Each week the typical American consumes almost 35 hrs of TV, 2 hrs of timeshifting, 4 hrs of internet, 22 minutes of online video and 4 minutes of mobile video.  Cross-media usage also continues to increase – now 59% of Americans use TV and the Internet simultaneously at least one time per month, spending 3.5 hours each month on TV and the Internet at the same time.”
I have things to say about this. First and foremost, I am not a typical American (woo hoo!). The great majority of TV that I watch is “timeshifted” (which sounds like a term from a sci-fi movie…then again, Tivo sometimes feels a bit Star Trekky). Like I mentioned many weeks back, my father is a tech-guru and felt it was our responsibility to make sure Tivo was a necessity in all homes. It passed with flying colors, but left an indellible mark on my family members – that being, for the past 10 years our patience with commericals has been nil. From my own made-up-on-the-spot statistical data, similar commercial-hating has been reported by 89% of DVR users.
Second and secondmost, 4 hours of internet sounds entirely too little. I just spent all day on the internet. Nielsen needs to have a little chat with a little company called Google. (Which, whoa! big news! was for the first time ever surpassed by another website in the number of people tuning in a month. That website? Facebook. Thank you to a very upset friend of mine for supplying this sad statistic).
Third and thirdmost, it’s about time people start multitasking more. If we can’t check our Weather Channel app while watching Lost, then we just aren’t 21st century kind of people.
Fourth and fourthmost, on a completely unrelated topic, I have added to my celeb-connection list. I was at a copy center yesterday, and a guy came in and started chewing my ear off, asking 21 questions about my life, my future and other demographic information you don’t usually share with strangers. Anyway, he said his father wrote the lyrics to Barry Manilow’s Mandy. I never had particularly positive feelings towards Barry Manilow until I watched him in an interview and he said he used to make up commercial jingles. Ready?! “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is thereeee” – Barry Manilow! And the ultimate commercial jingle of all time, “I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, cause Band-Aids stuck on me!” – Barry Manilow!!! Just that much closer to being famous…
Yours truly,

Rachel Lily