TiVo To Sell Fresh, Localized Bad News To Advertisers

TiVo's growth has stopped, and in fact, its user base is dropping. There's too much competition in the DVR market from the big cable companies who offer the same service at a lower price bundled with the cable boxes you need to have anyway. So TiVo needs a way to make more money. Selling customer data is always a good way to do that. Now, to be clear, this data will be anonymous, and TiVo has actually been doing this to some extent for several years. But tomorrow, the company plans to unveil a better challenger to Nielsen, the leader in TV audience data, USA Today reports . This type of data is vital to television advertisers because it dictates their ad sales. And TiVo thinks it can provide better data for more markets by using its 3 million plus subscribers, to dish out data that can be broken down by the second. TiVo is trying to play up the fact that such data can be useful to not only advertisers, but to television shows themselves. This way, they can see what parts of shows people skip through -- so news shows, for example, can better tailor key content. But this is really about the advertisers, who will want to know what ads people are skipping through, and at what times, during what programs. I'll make this simple: While not all DVR owners may skip through all commercials, I would bet that anyone who took the initiative to buy a TiVo -- a separate box that costs a few hundred dollars and requires a subscription fee on top of your cable bill -- skips through just about all commercials, period.