The politics and practice of television ratings conventions: Australian and American approaches to broadcast ratings

As we now know, once you introduce audience ratings, as China has done, you have not just introduced ‘a measure’; you have introduced a huge apparatus that brings with it certain types of agreements, values and behaviours. No doubt, China's leaders saw the ratings as a neutral mechanism in mapping broadcast audiences. The history of ratings, however, is quite the opposite. It is a set of standards, values and conventions that drives particular kinds of expectations in organizations, technology and content. Audience ratings first provided a coordination rule for advertiser-supported media and then became a convention, harnessed by TV to change media economics. In this paper the authors provide an insight into how audience ratings, as a convention – a compact – emerged in Australia and America, and some of the major differences between them.