Nielsen and its television network clients are looking for more viewership between the couch cushions.
On Tuesday, the audience measurement firm, which serves as the gold standard for television viewing metrics and is the currency by which television networks sell advertising to marketers, announced it would be “piloting a new methodology enhancement to more accurately account for co-viewing” for the Super Bowl. In viewership measurement terms, co-viewing is an instance where multiple people are watching one screen.
Under the current system, Nielsen requires households that are part of its sample to manually log how many viewers are watching a screen at any given time. The system being piloted involves people in Nielsen households equipping a wearable device resembling a smart watch to capture audio that allows for “more passive measurement that does not require a formal log in process.” The audio will track TV events, shows, and movies that a person (or people) are watching, similar to how its current Portable People Meter system works, but will automate the process of counting how many people in a household are watching any given event (assuming everyone in the household is equipped with their own wearable).
Nielsen has undergone a number of key changes to its methodology in recent years that have all generally served to increase the audience measurements for live sports, which remains the most important programming on television.
In September 2020, Nielsen began adding out-of-home viewing measurements to its top-line numbers, a move that helped boost audiences for live sports by approximately 10% compared to the old methodology by accounting for people watching television in bars, restaurants, and other public spaces. Last February, Nielsen expanded those out-of-home viewing measurements, which initially only covered two-thirds of the country, to cover 100% of the country, further contributing to increases versus previous years. The methodological discrepancy grew even greater last September, when Nielsen introduced its new Big Data + Panel measurements, which implement first-party data from tens of millions of connected TVs. Again, the change typically resulted in more favorable measurements for live sports.
Now, the focus is co-viewing. The pilot program involving the wearable devices will be utilized for Sunday’s Super Bowl, but it won’t count for the official viewership figure yet. Nielsen plans to announce the results of the pilot a few weeks after the big game. The goal, however, is to fully implement the new system in time for the 2026-27 season.
Doing so will, in all likelihood, make it even more difficult to compare television viewership to previous years under old methodological standards. And, predictably, this is another change designed to make the number go up.
In Nielsen’s defense, its old methods failed to capture the full breadth of a television audience. Each of the company’s changes has made viewership figures more accurate by accounting for all the different ways people can be watching television. It’s simply that such changes mar historical comparisons, which make it more difficult for ad buyers to accurately gauge the value of an audience size.
It’s not viewership inflation, per se, but it has the same effect. And at the end of the day, it’ll simply result in networks and leagues touting record audiences for games that, under prior measurement standards, likely wouldn’t come close to any record of significance.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.