U.S. Television Diffusion by County and Media Market, 1946-1960

Matthew Gentzkow's study catalogs the introduction of television across the United States. It includes the first commercial TV station in each Nielsen media market from 1946 to 1960 and county-level television set ownership from 1950 to 1960. The data uses 2002/2003 Nielsen market definitions and includes a crosswalk file linking counties to media markets.

Use Cases

• Modeling technology adoption rates based on television set ownership data.
• Analyzing the geographic spread of media infrastructure based on station start dates.
• Studying historical market definitions by linking county-level data to Nielsen DMAs.

Strengths

• Includes two distinct but linked data files covering stations and household ownership.
• Provides a temporal scope of up to 15 years for station data and 11 years for set ownership.
• Contains a crosswalk file to map county-level data to media markets.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

University of Chicago

Collection Method

Catalogs historical records of television station introductions and set ownership.

Time Range

1946-1960 for stations; 1950-1960 for set ownership.

Geography

United States, by county and Nielsen Designated Market Area (DMA).