Broadcasters' Audience Research Board

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The Broadcasters' Audience Research Board, or BARB, is the organisation that compiles television ratings in the United Kingdom. It was created to replace a previous system, where the BBC and ITV companies compiled their own ratings. It is owned by the BBC, the ITV companies, Channel 4, Five, BSkyB and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Participating families have a box on top of their TV which tracks the programmes they watch.

ITV digital channels viewing share 2000-2008

Currently, BARB have approximately 5,100 homes (equating to approximately 11,500 individuals)¹ participating in the panel. The box records exactly what programmes they watch, and the panellists indicate who is in the room watching by pressing a button on a remote control handset. The data is collected overnight and published as overnight ratings at around 9.30 the following morning for use by TV stations and the advertising industry. The following week, final figures are released which are a combination of the overnight figures with 'timeshift' figures (people recording a programme and watching it within a week). This means that with a total UK population of 58,789,194, according to the 2001 census, each viewer with a BARB reporting box represents over 5,000 people.

BARB numbers are extremely important to commercial television stations. The trading model that is used by television companies and advertising agencies depends on the number of people watching the shows and the commercial attractiveness of those people (simplistically young/well off very attractive and older/poorer less attractive). The advertising agency will pay the television station a certain amount of money based on the number of people watching a show. The BARB numbers are used to work this out. The higher the BARB numbers, the more money a television station will make.

This leads to some interesting situations on the smaller channels. Since there are many television stations, and many hours in the day, there can be situations where BARB will record zero viewers for certain programmes. As the TV advertising system is geared round BARB ratings all but the very smallest channels subscribe to BARB.

See also

• Audience measurement
• Nielsen Ratings

External links

• BARB website

References

• Verified via phone by BARB PR (Brown Lloyd James) [1]

v • d • e BARB UK TV weekly viewing share 1981-2008 ¹ These figures are updated weekly and show for comparison the viewing share of various channels, either since the channel launched or since BARB was created (January 1992). The channels shown are, in order, the BBC television channels, those from the ITV Network, those from Channel 4, Five, those from UKTV and those from BSkyB. This represents the majority of the first-run television and those channels carried by digital satellite, cable and Freeview. BBC One share 1981-2008 BBC Two share 1981-2008 BBC Three share 2003-2008 BBC Four share 2002-2008 ITV Network share 1981-2008 ITV2 share 2000-2008 ITV3 share 2004-2008 ITV4 share 2005-2008 Channel 4 share 1983-2008 E4 share 2001-2008 Film4 share 1998-2008 More4 share 2005-2008 Five share 1997-2008 UKTV Gold share 1992-2008 UKTV History share 2002-2008 BSkyB share 1995-2008 Sky1 share 1992-2008 Sky3 share 2005-2008 Sky Movies share 2000-2008 Sky Sports share 2000-2008 Sky News share 1992-2008 ¹ figures from BARB, updated to April 2008

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