A guide to the ratings system in Japan - Who monitors the ratings?

In response to a comment by one of the blog readers who asked for a post to explain how the ratings system in Japan works, here it comes! As there is quite a bit of information, I will break this topic up into a number of posts so please keep a lookout for this on the blog if you are interested in this as well.

To begin, we should probably look at who monitors the ratings in Japan. Generally, when you talk about ratings, Video Research Ltd. (http://www.videor.co.jp) is the only place to go to. Unlike other countries like Singapore (Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) vs. AC Nielsen) and South Korea (TNmS vs. AGB Nielson) where there are multiple ratings investigation companies, Video Research (VR for short) enjoys a monopoly in this sense. Since March 2000, ratings announced by VR have become the standard when it comes to household ratings figures.

Let's take a closer look at VR then. This company was set up back in September 1962 and started monitoring ratings in the Kanto region from December of the same year.Since then, they have expanded their business nationwide as well as overseas i.e. United States and Thailand. The company's HQ is in Tokyo and they have 6 branch offices in Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Sapporo, Sendai and Hiroshima. There are also three sales offices in Shizuoka, Okayama and Niigata. As of April 2012, they have 392 employees. In a nutshell, VR can be considered to be a homegrown veteran in the ratings business.

Before I even talk about how they track and calculate ratings in my next post, I would like to bring up something interesting I found out about VR. The company is supposed to track ratings of various TV programmes from different TV stations but in actual fact, the TV stations are shareholders of VR! The Big 5 private networks in the Kanto region i.e. FujiTV, TBS, NTV, TV Asahi and TV Tokyo all hold stakes in the company in addition to other smaller TV networks outside the Kanto region and various key publishers. Toshiba Solutions stands out as the sole technology company in the list of shareholders on VR's site so I'm guessing that the ratings monitoring equipment could have been procured from Toshiba. Surprisingly, NHK has nothing to do with this company. Anyway, it just comes across as weird that the investors are the ones having their ratings investigated by a company they jointly own and frankly speaking, it does seem to give rise to the appearance of conflict of interests. Not that I'm suggesting anything here but it's probably something not many people realise until they do some research on VR.

Next up, I will explain a bit more about the concept of ratings e.g. what it means by household and individual ratings and the methodology to monitor ratings on TV programmes. Please give your comments (if any) on this topic or if you would like me to do a special report similar to this for another Japanese entertainment-related topic!