Nielsen Will Give Digital-Ratings Credit for Video Views on Facebook, Hulu, YouTube

Nielsen is adding Facebook, Hulu and YouTube to its digital content ratings.

The Cross Screen world allows for both of the following to be true:
1) Ratings for the most popular content (NFL, primetime, etc.) are falling.
2) Consumers are watching more video than ever.

Consistent and comparable metrics between digital platforms should help advertisers decide where to put their dollars.

The Cross Screen world provides rating services with multiple challenges including:
1) Television — 75% of national TV audience time occurs during shows with a 0.5 or lower rating. This programming is very difficult to measure at the local level when the national sample (100k+ homes) is broken up into 210 pieces.

2) Digital — Mostly self-reported metrics by the networks with each one offering a different definition for a view. No standardization of ad pod compared to TV.

More on this topic. Cutting Through the Ratings Fog Using ACR

Quote from Zeev Neumeier — Executive VP, Product @ Inscape.
“When you are trying to assess viewership of CBS in New York City, not much modeling is required. Assessing Showtime viewership in Yellow Springs, Ohio, does require extensive modeling. And as the Sequent study showed, third-party modeling based on Nielsen can often lead to inaccuracies that harm the overall marketplace. Buyers and sellers looking for near real-time, quick-turnaround insights that capture the complete 2017 viewing experience should pay closer attention to data gathered from the glass of televisions.

When you have millions of points of validation coming from millions of homes scattered across all DMAs — the modeling is minimal and the market becomes more transparent.”

More on this topic.
1) Nielsen legitimizes the digital assault on television
2) Measuring the Hard to Measure