The beginning of this ongoing process of audience surveying began in the 1920s with radio when radio station owners grew curious about how many people actually listened to their stations. The broadcasters of these stations urged that listeners of their station filled out a post card verifying that they actually

heard this request and also to state whether their stations signal was clear or not. This type of survey continued on for a while until advertising companies began to demand the estimated size of their listening audience in order to decide what stations that they would air their product advertising on. Nevertheless the American Association of Advertising and the Association of National Advertisers coincided to form the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, or the CAB in 1930. From this came the first recorded method of audience recording called the telephone recall method. With this method 35 cities were chosen across the United States to have calls placed to random homes picked from a phone directory. From there they asked the residents to recall what programs they had been listening to. This was a start, but also a rough one due to the problem of forgetfulness. Even though this is more accurate than asking a person what they had listened to the night before, the human memory is not always correct or reliable. These methods of the CAB operated until 1946 when another company saw the opportunity at hand and seized the chance to begin a more accurate and more productive way to measure the audience. This new company called the C. E. Hooper introduced the telephone coincidental method, which is very similar to the telephone recall method in that household residents were asked if they were currently listening to the radio and what station or program they were tuned in to. This method was more accurate in that the questioned would not have to rely on their not so dependable memory. The results of this survey called Hooperatings were then sold to advertising agencies and broadcasters. This is as far as person-to-person telephone surveying went. From here on most if not all audience surveying was done mechanically through at home devices used to record the same data.

In 1942, a new company was unveiled called the A. C. Nielson Company. This new company was different from other rating companies in that the Nielson industry did not rely on only house-to-house telephone calls, but instead came up with a mechanical device called the audimeter. This audimeter was distributed to random households, this new device consisted of a sharp needle that marked a small sheet of paper each time the tuning knob was moved displaying what station was being listened to and how long the set was in use for, and after a certain period of time this device was to be sent in for analysis. This new contraption measured set use as opposed to actual listening time; nevertheless advertisers preferred the Nielson ratings to Hooperat

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1775
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)