media - Nielsen to improve its TV-rating

Some of the more avid readers of this blog might remember the stir ESWN caused last year, when he discovered that the famous Nielsen ratings for TV in China were based on 300 househoulds. You did not have to be much of an expert to see that 300 households was pretty low for a population of 1.3 billion.
Danwei now points at an article by the Financial Times, suggesting that the famous rating company is going to invest a bit in improving its ratings. They want to expand the number of households to 17,000 by the end of 2007.
Is that enough? I leave it up to the experts to say that, although it sounds still sounds a pretty low number. I'm working on on the China Wage Indicator and that would require for each economic region about 13,000 valid survey before scientifically valid figures are possible.
The problem with all rating agencies in China (including those for the internet) is that they cannot afford to invest too much in a market without knowing they will get a return on their investments. China's CCTV already indicated they would have very little interest in those figures. They would rather let their advertisers guess in stead of paying a lot of money for figures that are going to erode their earnings.