Like other conspiracy theories, in the real world, you have to keep inflating the number of entities "in on it" for it to work practically. Fox can pull all of the shady nonsense they want on their airwaves, but the ratings are the ratings.
Well, now it's a challenge: How To Pull This Off.
The idea of an apartment building with fake addresses in it has promise.
So, build a 50-storey tower with 20 units per floor. That's 1000 real units. Include an extra "utilities" suite on each floor.
During building, call in every local cable supplier to pre-wire the building. Tell them we want each unit to have a choice in who their supplier is, so they don't get suspicious if they notice other hook-ups in place. Around here, I can get TV service 3 ways: Rogers Cable, Bell Fiber, or Satellite, so that gives us 3000 potential hook-ups.
1000 of them will eventually be real hook-ups, but we can re-route the other 2000 to the utilities suite, where they connect to our fake boxes. Create addresses for each one, starting the numbering of fake units on each floor at 21, so no one in the building will accidentally get real mail sent to the fake address. Set up on-line billing for each account, so no mail is expected to arrive at all.
Gradually bring the fakes online, so no one at the cable companies notices a sudden spike in subscribers. Every cable company only gets the number of subscribers equal to the number of lines they put in, so no flags there. Spread out over time, and they might not even notice that they have an apparent 100% take-up in that building. Maybe restrict ourselves to only an 80 or 90% fake rate to cover the possibility of them noticing anyways.
So, now we have a real building, with real tenants, who really subscribe to some TV providers, but with fake units outnumbering real ones about 2-to-1.
Now, how much would that cost us in monthly subscriptions, and how many such buildings would we need to build to affect the ratings enough to matter?
