Since 1950, media research company Nielsen has been the scorekeeper for the TV business. Networks depend on its audience measurement data as they compete for $65 billion spent annually on advertising.
The anger has led several major Nielsen customers, including NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, to consider competing services. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, we did not expect it to last as long as it did. So over time there was a cumulative effect. I’d say by September-October we began to see some warning signals. We certainly communicated those , but we weren’t in the position to calculate exactly what would be different just to say, “It is different because it’s the pandemic.” And that was dissatisfying. And we said as soon as we get vaccinated, we’ll go back and recheck those homes.
Totally. 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. 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.
Some companies tell me they already can measure their own streaming data and will need Nielsen less. Are they right?