TV audience ratings agencies have been talking about near real time online measurement for some time, but so far it has largely been confined to adverts where the commercial incentives for getting going are greater. Now Nielsen, the biggest TV ratings agency of all, has launched a pilot program in the US to count audiences for content viewed online from the main Networks. Commercial launch in the US is slated for later in 2013, followed by extension to Nielsen’s overseas markets.
The three month Nielsen Digital Program Ratings trial begins later this month with the five major TV networks participating, that is NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and The CW, as well as online portal AOL. This follows AOL’s announcement in April 2013 of its collaboration with Nielsen to measure the audience viewing its own library of 620,000 premium videos.
Called custom AOL Video Reach (AVR), this will express audience sizes in the same terms as TV, enabling comparisons between viewing on TV with the audience of AOL’s original programming along with its curated premium partner content. Like AVR, the Nielsen pilot is based on the technology already used in the agency’s Online Campaign Ratings, which measures TV viewership for online advertising campaigns. The new Digital Program Ratings will measure similar metrics including unique audience, stream counts, and reach by age and gender for TV programming viewed online.
So far Nielsen has relied on the traditional panel based approach for measuring online TV audiences as opposed to advertising, relying on a supposedly representative sample of the population. This does not work so well in the fast changing dynamic realm of online TV, partly because the fragmented nature of audiences across multiple device platforms, means the statistical power to obtain accurate and consistent information across multiple sub categories is not really there. So direct online measurement represents a big step forward, enabling viewing of content to be summarized across different demographic groups within time slots down to single days or evenings. However the project has a way to go, since at present it is confined to viewing of content on the participating networks’ websites. Nielsen is not yet tracking viewership on third party sites like Netflix, Amazon Instant, or Hulu, so a lot of the online audience will not be picked up just yet.
However Nielsen has another string to its bow with its Twitter TV Rating announced in December 2012. This came shortly after polling the two candidates for the US Presidential election by assessing popularity on the basis of tweets. The thinking is that if the analysis is right this can be more representative of overall public opinion than a conventional poll, which is subject to various biases, not least that some people do not tell the truth. On the other hand the constituency of tweeters, while increasingly large, may not be representative either, but it does provide a new powerful tool for both advertisers and video content distributors. Nielsen has negotiated a multi-year deal starting late 2013 whereby Twitter will provide social metrics from its users. Nielsen believes that this will dovetail with its direct online measurements to provide highly accurate audience data.
Nielsen is hoping that the combined platform will simultaneously meet the needs of advertisers and content distributors. The former are only interested in total audiences as a crude measure of advertising success in the absence of direct counting of ‘conversions’, which can be the purchase of a product or some action like booking a test drive. Content distributors or pay TV operators on the other hand want a total breakdown of the audience by demographics.
Both parties want the ability to respond in real time to audience measurement data. Advertisers may want to change the demographic targeting or reach groups that have so far missed out or failed to ‘convert’. A broadcaster on the other hand might want to recommend content to a particular demographic group on the basis say of tweets that indicate it is popular with people in that group. Nielsen believes it is on track to meeting all of these aspirations.