Nielsen is now tracking ratings for nearly 1,000 streaming shows

Studios are now getting data on who's watching what on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu

Netflix is notorious for not providing audience numbers for its streaming programs, instead leaning on subscriber growth to give observers a sense of how well its efforts are doing. That's starting to change. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nielsen is currently months into a program that allows it to track shows on Netflix and other services like Amazon Prime and Hulu, and it now has data on nearly 1,000 shows — including how many people watch an episode and information like age and gender. Nielsen hopes that the data it shares can help studios negotiate for higher licensing fees from services if the shows that stream online are shown to do well.

Nielsen started measuring viewership data on streaming sites last winter as a means of giving major studios like Twentieth Century Fox and NBCUniversal a clearer sense of how streaming affects their revenue. Studios still make more money from traditional, ad-supported television, but subscription-based streaming has been eating into TV viewership for some time now. Charging Netflix and Amazon for popular shows can help stem any losses from audiences changing their viewing habits.

NIELSEN STILL DOESN'T TRACK STREAMING CONTENT ON MOBILE DEVICES

The data Nielsen is tracking is still fairly limited, though, since it doesn't include viewership from mobile devices or overseas subscribers. Nielsen has plans to include those metrics, but Netflix uses those limits to dismiss the effort out of hand. Meanwhile, the streaming giant also already provides certain well-paying studios with information on how often a show is streamed on a monthly basis. However, Netflix has reason to be a little nervous. If Nielsen data shows that its original programming doesn't have the same draw as licensed shows, investors may be somewhat less inclined to support the company's future projects.

The Most Searched Jobs in Salary.com

  

Which Jobs Are Most Searched on Salary.com?

Wondering which jobs people are searching the most? Well wonder no more, because we've got your answers.

With more than 4,000 job titles in our database, people from all over the country come to Salary.com and use our tools to find out how much jobs are paying. But which jobs are the most popular? Well, we combed through our data for the month of July and came up with the top 10 most-queried searches. And we'll be back on a monthly basis to update the results so you know which jobs are hot at any given time.

Is your job on the most-searched list?

Dentist

DENTIST

Median annual salary: $150,889

Better to be a dental student smiling pearly whites at the thought of future paychecks than a patient who will need that expertise. But whoever is searching, dentist is trending at the tail end of the top 10.

Personal Trainer

PERSONAL TRAINER

Median annual salary: $55,520

With summer in full swing, many men and women want to get in swimsuit shape. It's all about the gym and enlisting the help of personal trainers, which means many fitness-oriented people are checking out how much personals trainers make so they can potentially become one.

  

Accounting

ACCOUNTING SALARIES

Median annual salary: depends on the job title 

"Accounting" is search term not for a specific job title, but rather a popular industry. But whether people want to become accountants, actuaries, or auditing managers, it's clear there's a big interest in all jobs that fall under the accounting umbrella.

Flight Attendant

FLIGHT ATTENDANT

Median annual salary: $68,207

Clearly people want to know if the people handing out peanuts make -- wait for it -- peanuts, or not. But clearly at #7 on the most-searched jobs list, becoming a flight attendant is still an alluring occupation for many people.

College Professor

COLLEGE PROFESSOR

Median annual salary: Depends

As people get toward the end of July it's time to start thinking about hitting the books again, so it makes sense that people are searching out salaries for college professors. Obviously the level of pay is going to depend on many factors including years of experience, tenure, the size of the school, and the subject area, but all those people hoping to become college professors can check that link and find out roughly what they can expect to bring home for a paycheck.

  

Pediatric Physician

PEDIATRIC PHYSICIAN

Median annual salary: $181,270

As one of many healthcare related professions on the list, it turns out many people are curious to know what pediatric physicians make for a salary. Whether the searches are being done by soon-to-be doctors or by parents wondering why their co-pays are so high, remains to be seen.

Public School Teacher

Median annual salary: $53,183

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER

Searches for public school teacher salaries are consistently in the top 5, and July was no exception. Despite the fact that it's summer and school is out in most places, people always want to know what teachers make because it's constantly a hot topic. And for education majors going back to school in September, it's necessary information. Just don't be discouraged at the amount, and keep fighting for more pay for teachers!

Nurse Practitioner

NURSE PRACTITIONER

Median annual salary: $97,448

Nurses. We need them badly and nursing jobs are always a big draw on our site as people considering nursing school and careers in the healthcare industry invariably search for this job title.

  

Engineering

ENGINEERING

Median annual salary: Depends

Again, this is not an exact job description but it's a field that was the second-most searched term on our site in the month of July. It's clear people start here on a catch-all page and then narrow their choices be it chemical engineer, aerospace engineer, electrical engineer, or any other of the many fields under this umbrella.

Physical Therapist

PHYSICAL THERAPIST
Median annual salary: $80,139

The most-searched job out of all 4,000+ job titles and fields in July was physical therapist. As the multitude of Baby Boomers reaches an age of physical decline, physical therapists have become very much in demand, so it makes sense people are going into the field and researching it at a high rate.

Stop Kidding Yourself. A Classic Car Is (Almost) Never a Good Investment (BusinessWeek)

Why Ferrari-nomics can be a dismal science.

A Ferrari 365 from 1972 is expected to fetch somewhere around $450,000 during the annual Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey, Calif. this weekend. When it was last bought in 2008, the car was worth $160,000. For the investment, the lucky owner may receive roughly triple his money and a few memorable – albeit nerve-wracking – road trips with 8-track theme music.

The 1972 Ferrari comes with a mouse-hair dashboard and an 8-track stereo.

So should you be trying to get into the vintage-car game? In a word: no. No way. Absolutely not. Here's why:

1. Lots of Idling

The Pebble Beach sales, like most marquee car auctions, are an exception. Only about 3 percent of vintage cars sell at auction and they are the best of the best. It’s like watching a super-cut of holes-in-one and deciding to try your hand at golf.

In reality, values for scads of vintage cars have been relatively stable for years. Detroit classics from the 1950s, for example, have mostly idled in the past decade, according to Hagerty Insurance, which tracks the values of the various old rides it underwrites. The same goes for muscle cars and so-called affordable collectibles like the Triumph TR6 and the Volkswagen Beetle.

 2. A Tendency to Stall

Rolling assets are not in any way recession-proof, no matter what the exotic car dealer tells you. In the 2008 downturn, the only upside to owning a vintage Mercedes 300 with gull-wing doors was feeling slightly less frightened to actually drive it. From the third quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009, the value of “blue-chip” collectibles like "the Gullwing" slid by 19 percent, according to Hagerty. That’s more than twice as much as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. A sampling of vintage Ferraris in that window fared even worse, plummeting 25 percent.

 3. Running Hot

Post-recession, the rebound was swift. A lot of vintage-car gurus believe that the run-up in prices since the recession is officially in "frothy" territory. A Hagerty monthly index of expert sentiment on the market has dropped 9 percent in the past year.

Rick Drewry, senior claims specialist of collector cars at American Modern Insurance Group, said the auctions are starting to attract investors who don't know much about cars at all. "I'm starting to see cars that weren't ever that good go up in value," he explained. "For the longest time, they were throw-aways." In short, we may be approaching peak Porsche.

4. Slow and Saggy

Here's an uncomfortable truth: Classic cars are kind of awful -- at least relatively speaking1. Sure, they are moving time capsules of miraculous engineering and most of them have swoon-worthy looks. But would you race a 50-year-old road bicycle or do your taxes on a computer from 1965? In terms of going fast and handling the curves, today’s most pedestrian vehicles are far more capable than almost all vintage rides.

Ford's Focus offers vintage Ferrari performance for $17,000

Take that Ferrari 365 from 1972. It gets to 60 miles-per-hour in about 7 seconds and has a top speed of 163. Today’s sportiest Ford Focus puts out similar numbers with eight fewer cylinders, a bunch more airbags, and a back-up camera to boot. Sure, it doesn't have an 8-track, but it also doesn't have six separate carburetors to tune.

 5. If You Must Buy…

If absolutely none of these facts sway you, at least go for the German and Italian brands. Avoid anything manufactured by the Americans or the Brits. Sure, they are hot at the moment and tend to crash harder, but the economic magic behind companies like Porsche and Ferrari is on the supply side. They simply didn’t make that many cars, which means that when markets get hot they have a bit of a turbo effect.

When shopping for your dream car, consider models from the 1980s and 1990s. They were the ones on bedroom posters of Generation Xers who are entering in their prime earning years and they are just now starting to appreciate accordingly. A Lamborghini Countach from 1989 is the perfect example. "For a kid in the '80s, that car was like a unicorn," Drewry said.

A 1989 Lamborghini Countach, the stuff of Gen-X school-boy fantasies.

Finally, if you're bent on buying old cars, get as many as you can afford. Classic vehicles are like tiny tech companies: it’s very difficult to tell which ones are going to take off. Just don’t forget about the management fees (read: mechanics).

Paperless Business? Find out ...

These Are the Most Vermin-Filled Cities in the U.S.(BusinessWeek)

Roach motels, mouse traps, and rat nests

Tampa, Fla., is among the roachiest big cities in America. Seattle may be the rattiest. Philadelphia has more mouse sightings per housing unit than any other U.S. city. These are some of the filthy highlights from the U.S. Census Bureau's biennial accounting of rat, mouse, and cockroach sightings across the country. The most recent numbers, collected in 2013, were released last month.

The data comes from the American Housing Survey, which is conducted every two years. And it does have limitations. For one, the survey includes only households, so sightings in public areas like subways and sidewalks don't count. And in each installment, the Census breaks down detailed data for only 25 metropolitan areas. This year, the list included Chicago, Houston, and New York—but it didn't include Dallas, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

Which means that while Richmond, Va., had the smallest share of households that reported signs of a rat among the 2013 cohort, it isn't necessarily the U.S. city with the fewest rats.

It's apparent from the data that the variety and quantity of vermin is at least partly determined by geographical factors. Mice were more likely to be found in colder, Northern cities. Roaches and rats seem to reproduce more rapidly in warmer climates.

So what cities appear to be the most and least infested overall? We ranked each city from 1 to 25 for each type of pest, with lower numbers meaning that sightings were less common. New York, allegedly the city of 2 million rats, had the highest cumulative score. (Austin was second.) Detroit ranked as the city where residents are least likely to report a mouse, rat, or cockroach—somewhat surprising given the blighted condition of the city's housing stock.

Despite its limitations, the data offers some insights into quality of housing and quality of life—and perhaps into the effectiveness of local public health efforts. The National Center for Healthy Housing links exposure to rodents and cockroaches to asthma and other health risks. In Boston, city officials have linked improved pest control to a sharp drop in asthma symptoms among public housing residents.

Compared with the national average, households living below the poverty line were 50 percent more likely to report evidence of rats or roaches. Black and Hispanic households were also far more likely to report those two categories of pests. Houses and apartments built in the last four years were far less likely to be visited by vermin.

Mice, however, were reported evenly across demographic lines. Squeak.

Uber’s Political Victory in New York, by the Numbers (BusinessSWeek)

The ride-hailing app faced off against the city’s mayor and won

Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has said he wants to refashion the car-booking company into a sort of politician to fight against the taxicab industry. Kalanick should get the confetti ready because Uber just won perhaps its biggest campaign yet. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio backed down on a plan to stall the growth of Uber and similar ride-hailing apps.

Buried within the mounds of tweets, retweets, newspaper editorials, insulting app “features,” television commercials and press releases, a lot of stats have been thrown around by both camps in the hopes of swaying New Yorkers. Here are eight of the most cited numbers that helped shape the debate, and eventually tilted the campaign in Uber’s favor.

13,637 taxis

This is the number of taxicab licenses, known as medallions, that are in circulation in New York. Unlike with Uber cars, yellow cabs can pick up pedestrians using their old-fashioned hands to hail on the streets. Because the medallion supply is limited, they fetch high prices. Winning bidders for a batch of medallions sold in 2014 paid as much as $965,000.

19,000 Uber cars

The number of vehicles on Uber’s system in New York has surpassed taxis, according to company data. While Uber drivers can use their own cars and aren’t required to purchase pricey medallions, they still must register with the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the same group that handles licenses for cab drivers. The commission, which also regulates private black car services, says it has more than 50,000 vehicles and about 100,000 drivers registered.

1 percent growth limit

The de Blasio-backed proposal, which drew the ire of Governor Andrew Cuomo and model Kate Upton, would have capped Uber’s growth at 1 percent a year. Uber says the number of vehicles on its system is expanding at about 3 percent a month. The company claims the limit would have doubled or tripled wait times for passengers.

100,000 new Uber riders a month

The company says it needs to keep adding drivers at a fast pace because its customer base is also expanding quickly. Uber says the bill would have allowed it to add 16 new drivers a month, which wouldn’t be nearly enough to accommodate 100,000 new riders

22 bankrupt taxi companies

Nearly two dozen companies owning 46 medallions filed for bankruptcy in Brooklyn on Wednesday. Evgeny Freidman, sole manager of the companies, said in a court filing that banks are hesitant to lend to medallion companies due to concern about competition from Uber.

$500,000 in campaign donations

The traditional taxi and limousine industry gave de Blasio’s 2013 mayoral campaign more than $500,000. The taxi industry also donated more than $150,000 to council members, including more than $8,500 to Ydanis Rodriguez, chairman of the Transportation Committee, who had committed to imposing the growth limits.

90 percent market share

There was a third candidate in this political campaign: Lyft, a much smaller ride-booking app. Diana Dellamere, public policy manager at the San Francisco startup, presented testimony to the New York City Council’s Transportation Committee on June 30, saying Uber controlled 90 percent of the market for car-booking apps in the city. Lyft's market share is 7 percent, and the company wouldn’t be able to catch up if the proposal were implemented, she said. “It would preserve and extend one company’s dominance while prohibiting others from offering a legitimately competitive service for consumers. Uber wins, while consumers, drivers, and competitors lose.”

$30 billion in annual wages

Employing a classic political tactic, Uber highlighted the importance of the technology industry to New York, suggesting de Blasio’s proposal was an attack on all tech workers. In a campaign organized partly by David Plouffe, a former strategist for President Obama who sits on Uber’s board of directors, Uber says tech in the city accounts for about 300,000 jobs and $30 billion in yearly wages. The company also says the proposed legislation could have caused the loss of 10,000 jobs—most of which are for Uber drivers, not employees of the company.

These Are the Top 20 Cities Americans Are Ditching (BusinessWeek)

Soaring costs of living meant residents left New York City and its suburbs in droves

New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu: They're all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans. So it might come as a surprise that these are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves. 

The map below shows the 20 metropolitan areas that lost the greatest share of local people to other parts of the country between July 2013 and July 2014, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The New York City area ranked 2nd, losing about a net 163,000 U.S. residents, closely followed by a couple surrounding suburbs in Connecticut. Honolulu ranked fourth and Los Angeles ranked 14th. The Bloomberg calculations looked at the 100 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas. 

Interestingly, these are also the cities with some of the highest net inflows of people from outside the country. That gives many of these cities a steadily growing population, despite the net exodus of people moving within the U.S. 

So what's going on here? Michael Stoll, a professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles, has an idea. Soaring home prices are pushing local residents out and scaring away potential new ones from other parts of the country, he said. (Everyone knows how unaffordable the Manhattan area has become.)

And as Americans leave, people from abroad move in to these bustling cities to fill the vacant low-skilled jobs. They are able to do so by living in what Stoll calls "creative housing arrangements" in which they pack six to eight individuals, or two to four families, into one apartment or home. It's an arrangement that most Americans just aren't willing to pursue, and even many immigrants decide it's not for them as time goes by, he said. 

In addition, the growing demand for high-skilled workers, especially in the technology industry, brought foreigners who possess those skills to the U.S.  They are compensated appropriately and can afford to live in these high-cost areas, just like Americans who hold similar positions. One example is Washington, D.C., which had a lot of people from abroad arriving to soak up jobs in the growing tech-hub, Stoll said. 

Other areas weren't so lucky. Take some of the Rust Belt cities that experienced fast drops in their American populations, like Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo, even though they are relatively inexpensive places to live. These cities didn't get enough international migrants to make up for the  those who left, a reflection of the fact that locals were probably leaving out of a lack of jobs. 

This is part of a multiple-decade trend of the U.S. population moving away from these manufacturing hubs to areas in the Sun Belt and the Pacific Northwest, Stoll said. Retiring baby boomers are also leaving the Northeast and migrating to more affordable places with better climates. 

This explains why the majority of metropolitan areas in Florida and Texas, as well as west-coast cities like Portland, had an influx of people.

El Paso, Texas, the city that residents fled from at the fastest pace, also saw a surprisingly small number of foreigners settling in given how close it is to Mexico. 

"A lot of young, reasonably educated people are having a hard time finding work there," Stoll said. "They're not staying in town after they graduate," leaving for the faster-growing economies of neighboring metro areas like Dallas and Austin, he said. 

Methodology: Bloomberg ranked 100 of the most populous U.S. metropolitan areas based on their net domestic migration rates, from July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014, as a percentage of total population as of July 2013. Domestic migration refers to people moving within the country (e.g. someone moving from New York City to San Francisco). A negative rate indicates more people leaving than coming in. International migration refers to a local resident leaving for a foreign country or someone from outside the U.S. moving into the U.S.