nytimes.com/2007/10/24/busines ...

   Google, which dominates the market for advertising on the Internet, seems to be hoping to do the same thing on television.

The company is set to announce a partnership today with the Nielsen Company, the voice of authority in measuring television audiences, that will give advertisers a more vivid and accurate snapshot than ever before of how many people are viewing commercials on a second-by-second basis, and who those people are.

At a time when digital video recorders are proliferating, advertisers are thirsty for any data they can get about who is watching their ads, who is fast-forwarding past them and where it makes the most sense to invest.

Although the initiative between Google and Nielsen will start relatively small, with ratings gleaned from set-top boxes within a single cable operator’s network, the companies say that their deal spans several years and that the relationship will grow.

“We want to bring all the advantages that we see in online advertising — like more accountability, a better sense of the audience, better tools to optimize a campaign — and bring them to television to make TV advertising more effective,” said Michael Steib, director for television ads at Google.