Here's how it used to work, in the television business: you'd make a show and hope that a lot of people watched it. Through a series of measurement techniques — some of which seemed then, and still seem now, a little suspect — you'd wake up the next day and find out how many people watched your show the night before, and roughly how old they were. From that you could deduce how much money they had and what they liked to spend it on, and if those numbers were high enough and rare enough, you'd have what was called a hit TV show. The only trick to the whole business was, do not let the customer change the channel...
KCRW
