Nielsen (again) updates methodology in time for football season

As expected, Nielsen will be implementing enhancements to its audience measurement methodology in time for football season next month.

The company announced on Wednesday that it will move forward with its updated co-viewing measurement system to more accurately capture the number of people watching an event in the same room. Nielsen piloted its enhanced co-viewing method earlier this year, measuring marquee sporting events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, NBA All-Star Game, and Daytona 500. In all, the new system increased audiences for these events by about four percent compared to its current measurement standards.

However, Nielsen stressed in its announcement that viewership increases are not guaranteed with the new co-viewing methodology.

“As with all of the recent Nielsen measurement innovations, the goal is for more accurate ratings and there is no guarantee for increased ratings with these changes,” the company wrote.

Traditionally, co-viewing has been measured using a formal log-in process that requires Nielsen households to manually select how many people are in a room watching a given event. Now, co-viewing will be measured through a wearable device that resembles a smart watch and can pick up the audio signature of whatever program viewers are watching.

Nielsen’s updated co-viewing methodology comes just about one year after the NFL publicly criticized the company for failing to properly capture such viewership, alleging the firm is “systematically undercounting” millions of NFL viewers.

Since 2020, Nielsen has introduced a number of major methodological changes, all of which have had the effect of raising viewership data compared to historical norms. First, Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing measurements into its top-line data after years of reporting the number separately. Several years later, Nielsen expanded these out-of-home measurements, which initially reached just two-thirds of the country, to reach the entire contiguous United States. Shortly after, Nielsen implemented “Big Data” into its measurements, which collects data from millions of connected televisions and incorporates that data into its traditional panel measurements. The co-viewing change marks the company’s fourth major methodology shift in six years.

There is clear incentive for Nielsen to make its partners at both the league and network level happy. Sports leagues and television networks are two of Nielsen’s most important cohorts of clients, and both rely on the company’s data to grow their businesses. Leagues use Nielsen’s data to leverage higher media rights fees, while networks leverage the same data to sell advertising against live sports programming. It helps all involved for the top-line viewership number to continue going up, even if it muddies historical comparisons.

That’s not to say Nielsen’s new measurements aren’t more accurate. There’s a likelihood that they are. If co-viewing wasn’t being properly accounted for under the old methodology, it has an obligation to change how co-viewing is measured.

But there’s a clear knock-on effect for most of Nielsen’s recent changes. They all increase viewership for live sports, except in certain niche cases. Expect the same result this time around when football viewership begins coming out next month.