Investigation into fake ratings: A TV series sold over 100 million RMB, of which 90 million RMB was spent on buying ratings

Ratings are one of the important indicators for evaluating the quality of a TV series. Ratings refer to the percentage of viewers who watch a certain channel or program in a certain period of time to the total number of viewers in the market.

Recently, an industry insider revealed that more than 90% of TV dramas involve buying ratings. A TV drama he participated in, which was broadcast on satellite TV in April, sold more than 100 million yuan in total, but spent 90 million yuan buying ratings. In other words, all the money earned was spent on buying ratings. Obviously, this stubborn problem has become a major cancer in the industry.

A certain audience ratings research organization has tens of thousands of sample households scattered across various provinces in the country, and only a few hundred sample households are allocated to each region. They install audience ratings meters similar to set-top boxes on the televisions of these sample households, collect data and conduct statistical analysis. Because the number of sample households is limited, this provides "convenience" to a certain extent for counterfeiters. For example, there are 500 audience ratings sample households in Beijing. If a TV series hopes to improve its ratings ranking in the region, it only needs to find 10 sample households and manipulate them, and the ratings of the series can be increased by at least 0.5 percentage points.

So what are the benefits of faking ratings? Professionals say that faking ratings is convenient for TV stations to attract advertisers, producers to collect payments, and advertisers to make good on their promises. As a result, professional ratings faking agencies and even industries have emerged, using methods such as contaminating sample households and tampering with data, where tampering often relies on hackers interfering with servers.

Obviously, buying ratings is a fraudulent act that not only disrupts the market order, but is also irresponsible to the audience.