Any media company wants accurate data. Having worked in sports radio for more than two decades, Nielsen’s ratings methodology was always a pain point. Despite the data we paid for and advertisers counted on, walking the streets often told a different story. Sports radio has been severely undermined by audience measurement for decades. The same goes for sports television and the viewership figures that flood timelines and my inbox from networks.
The difference between radio and television is the amount of change Nielsen has made to its television measurement compared to its radio product. Beginning today, Nielsen will make a new co-viewing methodology part of its official audience measurements. It’s the third major shift to the company’s television measurement methodology in less than two years, following expanded out-of-home measurement and the introduction of Big Data + Panel.
Each change is designed to make the numbers more accurate. That’s a good thing. But there’s another issue that doesn’t get enough attention. Every time the methodology changes, the data changes with it.
Good, bad or indifferent, it’s no longer apples to apples. It’s more like apples to grapefruits, with some oranges mixed in as well.
NFL Can’t Get No… Satisfaction
Last year, prior to the installation of Big Data + Panel measurement, the NFL felt the changes could cost the league’s media partners advertising revenue and hamper potential rights negotiations.
“There are millions of viewers that we believe they are systematically undercounting,” NFL Chief Data and Analytics Officer Paul Ballew told the Wall Street Journal in September 2025.
Last season, the NFL saw its highest viewership season in more than three decades and its second-best mark on record. The 2025 regular-season average was 18.7 million viewers per game, up 10% from the previous year. For comparison, in 2024, the NFL saw a 2.2% drop in average viewership.
According to data from Guideline, NFL advertising revenue in 2025-26 grew 6.8% year over year to $5.87 billion. Remove playoff and Super Bowl LX inventory from the equation, and the total take was $4.24 billion, up 6% from the previous regular-season campaign.
The NFL’s concerns about the impact of the measurement changes did not materialize in the way the league feared. Viewership went up. Revenue went up. NFL media partners did extremely well.
You would think a change to the system that produces stronger numbers across the board would be something everyone would want to keep in place. Now it’s 2026. Co-viewing is here. Another change to the formula, and the NFL is at it again.
“Our concern is that this is going to make measurement for the upcoming season muddled,” NFL SVP of Data and Analytics Paul Ballew told Front Office Sports. “It’s been a real struggle with Nielsen, and these latest changes raise even more questions for us. It is time for us to double down on our efforts to determine alternatives in the marketplace.”
But this is also the same Paul Ballew who told the Wall Street Journal last year that Nielsen was undercounting co-viewing for NFL games and that the league believed more work needed to be done. Isn’t that what Nielsen is doing here?
CBS Sports President and CEO David Berson applauded the new co-viewing change. “What we’re pleased about is that the viewership metrics are finally capturing what we think is the accurate audience,” Berson said.
Nielsen Is The Middle Man
Let’s just call this what it is.
The NFL wants as many people counted as possible because larger audiences can help justify higher media rights costs, potentially pushing those rights to levels some networks may never be able to afford. The networks appreciate the added viewership and revenue that came with carrying NFL games this past year.
At the same time, they have an incentive to keep the measurement system closer to its current level. Or even take a little bit of a hit in reported viewership in 2026, if doing so helps keep media rights at a more affordable level.
Thrre things can be true at the same time. The NFL can want more viewers counted. Networks can want stable, predictable numbers. Nielsen can want to improve its methodology. But that brings us back to the bigger problem.
What can’t be ignored, however, is what those changes do to historical comparisons. When the methodology changes from one season to the next, the measurement baseline changes with it. That means an 18.7 million average in one year may not represent the same measurement standard as an 18.7 million average several years earlier. The number may look comparable on paper, but the methodology behind that number may no longer be.
That distinction matters.
Nielsen’s job is to continually improve the accuracy of its measurement. The company says its latest changes are designed to do exactly that. With co-viewing, weighting and other enhancements intended to create a more accurate picture of television audiences.
Be Better
The problem isn’t necessarily that Nielsen is changing the methodology. The problem is what happens when we use the new numbers to judge the old numbers. If the rules for counting the audience change, then the numbers being produced under those rules change as well.
That makes it increasingly difficult to say that television audiences are growing, declining or holding steady when the measurement standard itself keeps moving. Imagine changing the rules for keeping score after every season and then using the final scores to determine which team had the better decade.
The numbers would still be real. The comparison would not be. That is the real problem with Nielsen’s constantly evolving formula.
At some point, we have to stop pretending every year fits neatly beside the one before it. Nielsen may be producing a better number today than it did yesterday. That doesn’t mean yesterday’s number provides a clean comparison for today’s.
And that’s where the sports media industry needs more transparency. Share the numbers good, bad, indifferent and stop comparing them to the past. Two things can be true at the same time: Nielsen can be getting better at measuring audiences, and the industry can be getting worse at comparing those audiences from one year to the next.
When the measurement system changes every NFL season, eventually the numbers become less useful for answering the question everyone wants to know: Are more people watching?
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