Nielsen Can't Keep Up

The Nielsen Company finally announced plans for its “TVandPC” initiative, which will combine online viewing audience data with its current TV ratings system. In 2007, this system added DVR playbacks—the viewing of a show on the same day and up to seven days after the original airing—in addition to live viewing.

Even though Nielsen is recognizing the computer screen as another TV viewing method, it’s not going to be enough to collect a more accurate representation of the viewing population. They must acknowledge that there's a vast amount of uncollected data they need to get their hands on in order to give audiences what they want to see. Just think of all the casualties of an unfair ratings system that left you scratching your head and protesting.

Nielsen will place Internet meters on only 7, 500 panel (measurement) homes—a number representing just .0066 percent of the TV-viewing population, which is their usual number sample. But technology exists to evaluate a larger, more accurate sample with the rapid growth of DVR and Internet. This makes it difficult to trust whether Nielsen will ever have an accurate view of their beloved 18-49 demographic.The lower bracket of this demographic is especially tech-savvy. They are the primary users of DVR and the Internet. They’re completely mobile, using cell phones and laptops to access everything within a few seconds, including television.

Advertising is the main influence of whether a show stays on the air. It's based on Nielsen data called C3, which stands for live commercial viewing plus three day playback of commercials viewed via DVR. If Nielsen doesn't calculate high audience numbers for a group that advertisers are targeting during a broadcast, the advertisers will stop paying the network to run their ads and in turn, the network will likely pull the plug on the show. But Nielsen hasn't kept up with how to track the young audience that views media in multiple ways. Nielsen finally seems to recognize the system’s complications, but not before years of irrelevant data that catered to the live-viewing audience.

Nielsen's factoring of DVR playback has demonstrated some noteworthy differences in live viewership versus seven days so far, but the problem is their methods are slow to report and networks are impatient to evaluate those delayed numbers. Shows (and their audiences) shouldn’t be faulted because the audience watches later through DVR because it’s a more accommodating option. Isn't that why we have the technology?

The recently canceled "Dollhouse" produced low ratings in the dreaded Friday night time slot, but had the highest DVR percent increase of any show on network TV at 44.9 percent in 2009. This was reported in December— one month after Fox canceled the show.Who knows what that number would have looked like had we seen the data your cable provider has locked away?

Accessing DVR data of cable subscribers could be one solution to the very small, representative sample. However, cable companies such as Time Warner and Comcast currently have no interest in sharing data with Nielsen. No doubt this could be delivered one day— for a price. But if Nielsen could do that, wouldn’t they have just placed more people meters or integrated online data years ago?

Meanwhile, Nielsen is losing the patience of businesses beyond network television that can't afford for Nielsen to drag their feet on their methods any longer. Hulu, a popular online TV viewing spot, had reasonable concerns with Nielsen back in March. Both Nielsen and another research group, comScore, recorded the number of visits to the Hulu website. Nielsen recorded 8.9 million visits. ComScore counted 42 million.

Nielsen’s acknowledgment of the “extended screen” is great, but a few years too late. Concerns with Nielsen reporting are justified. A discrepancy of nearly 33 million website visits might make a difference in how successful a company is rated. Nielsen won’t even be able to start reporting on their online findings until August 2010. If Nielsen doesn’t keep up with viewing habits, the complaints will be more frequent and louder than any disappointed TV viewers. Nielsen needs to catch up or be canceled.

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