You needn't look far to see this website has zero respect for the methodology of Nielsen, the audience measurement giant whose television ratings decide where billions of advertising dollars get spent. Employing household panels who volunteer to have their viewing habits tracked (in exchange for a small fee), Nielsen relies on Americans to report back to the company what they watched; Nielsen then expands that sample data to tell media buying agencies and network executives how many people across America tuned in to their show. Nielsen's entire measurement panel includes just 14,000 households; in 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau clocked 105,480,101 households in America. That means Nielsen uses just 0.0132 percent of the population to determine this nation's viewing habits.

The whole thing is flawed.

Young people, especially college students, go under-counted. Same for minorities. Entire urban markets may be represented by a frighteningly small number of homes. And the whole phenomenon of recording TV and watching it later? Nielsen has a frail and inadequate solution for measuring DVR viewership.

And yet, Nielsen represents its data as accurate, continues peddling it to anyone who will listen (read: everyone), and thus has more power than even the TV studios in deciding which shows get canceled because they don't pull in enough viewers. You can imagine Brooke Shields' frustration with this whole charade.

And now, finally, a television network with the balls to say something about Nielsen's crapshoot analysis is … saying something.

Reports MediaPost:

The chief research executive for one of the fastest growing digital tier networks - Current TV - Wednesday made an impassioned plea to a group of top industry executives to help solve a vexing bias in the way TV households are sampled that handicaps smaller and emerging channels. The plea, made by Current TV Vice President Research Theresa Falcon in a joint presentation with EVADConsulting President Frank Foster during a meeting of MPG's Collaborative Alliance in New York, sparked a debate among several leading TV ratings developers in the room, but TV ratings giant Nielsen was conspicuously absent.

The plea followed the presentation of an analysis by Foster showing that smaller cable networks must reach disproportionately more of Nielsen's panel households to generate comparable ratings. Foster implied this was due to a methodological glitch, and the fact that Nielsen's total national sample of about 14,000 households is not nearly large enough to accurately represent smaller TV outlets as the medium continues to fragment.

"The drops in viewing can be precipitous," Foster said of the impact on smaller channels, and noted that it would become even more exacerbated in February 2009, when the federally mandated transition to digital broadcast spectrum occurs and many local broadcasters begin multicasting as many as six niche channels in their markets, fragmenting the ratings pie exponentially and putting an acute strain on Nielsen's sample households.

And how does this play out?

Current's Falcon offered a glimpse of that future yet to come, revealing her own frustration after subscribing to Nielsen's preliminary ratings for Current TV over the past couple of years, which she implied still is far from ready for prime-time.

"We noticed a lot of challenges with the numbers," she said. "There were crazy swings in household and demographic numbers in regards to concentration - really high highs and really low lows month-to-month."

She implied the dramatic fluctuations were due not to actual shifts in audience viewing patterns, but to instability in Nielsen's ratings methodology and the tiny base it uses to project national TV audiences.

So what's the solution? The one we've always been aiming for: Start measuring viewing habits directly. Most homes have at least one cable box, a technology that's already capable of displaying on-screen guides, HD programming, and digital recording. Why not add in anonymous viewership tracking? (Nielsen competitors like TNS are doing just this.) Nielsen's insignificant sample pool of 14,000 then explodes to tens of millions, providing a much clearer picture of who's watching what.

Fine, privacy advocates can scream "fire," but in exchange for the Time Warners and Cox Communications of the world keeping a blind eye on their customers' viewing habits, shows like Arrested Development might still be around while Knight Rider could finally be sent off to a farm to die and 30 Rock wouldn't be teetering on the brink. And those ads that TV networks force you to watch? Perhaps they could actually be better targeted and relevant.

Throw in some household demographic data tied to your anonymous ID — so they known whether NCIS is more popular among the 15- or 65-year-old set — and it's an advertiser's wet dream. More importantly for people like us, it's a viewer's wet dream.

So kudos to Current, for saying what few other networks — who fear Nielsen could get retribution by reporting a sharp decline in their viewers — will.