Cord-cutting has become a phenomenon as many decide to ditch cable and satellite, switching to various streaming platforms. As numerous television consumers switch over, it raises how the Nielsen ratings take into account these types of viewers.
Media giants NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, along with other Nielsen customers, have called for a competing service. Nonetheless, David Kenny, the chief executive of Nielsen, spoke with the Los Angeles Times to discuss their challenges.
Kelly believes that the audience shifts to streaming platforms and DVRing their programs has led to media companies taking their anger out on Nielsen.
“There have been angry spats for 30 years when there’s a major transition in the technology. And this is the biggest transition. So the other thing to remember is on December 6th of 2020 we did communicate that we were moving to time spent [viewing] and combine streaming and linear measurement,” Kelly said.
“The audience was not seeing a difference, whether she watched that program on a smart TV through an app, streamed or recorded on her DVR, or live. So we believe the most accurate measure is to measure total time spent. And that is a big change for people who have relied on a schedule as their way to get a premium audience.”
Furthermore, Kelly stated to The Times that Nielsen is further improving ways to account for cord-cutters, saying that “half of the panel of homes has streaming meters.”
“It’ll be all of the panel over the next year. And that’s important because that measures everything that comes in through the router. That gives us viewing on a lot of screens, because people are watching TV on phones and tablets now as well,” Kelly said.
“It gives you a very different metric and we’re measuring it literally second by second. The advertiser will not just know what the program rating was, but they will know how many people saw their ad for its entirety.”
Finally, Kelly isn’t worried about media companies calling for some competition for Nielsen. He stated that no other digital company would make the investment they have to gather these ratings.
“That’s not my concern. When NBC pulled together a [list] of a hundred different companies, even by their own admission there were only a handful that they thought even have a chance of doing currency [a metric that tells how many people are watching],” Kelly said.
But ultimately, the currency has got to be trusted by the buyer and the seller as the most accurate. You still need a robust panel to validate that data. And nobody’s going to make the multibillion-dollar investment that Nielsen’s made to do that at this point, in my opinion (…) I don’t see anybody out there who’s got remotely the scale, the ability to do empirical evidence, or the trust factor by both buyer and seller that Nielsen does.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
