Nielsen has refreshed its monthly “The Gauge” report to count Warner Bros Discovery’s (WBD) and Paramount Global’s streaming services as collectives, rather than on an individual basis.
The change was made with the measurement firm’s monthly report released on Tuesday, which evaluated time spent with various TV platforms in March, and comes about two months after Nielsen did the same with streaming apps owned by the Walt Disney Company.
Moving forward, Nielsen says it will count Paramount’s Pluto TV and Paramount Plus as a single unit, called “Paramount streaming,” while grouping WBD-owned Max and Discovery Plus as “Warner Bros Discovery streaming.”
The changes are part of an “effort to better represent these companies as they go to market,” Nielsen said in a statement.
Nielsen already measures companies on a top-level basis through its monthly “Media Distributor Gauge” report, which examines the total share of audience for Disney, WBD, Paramount and other media, entertainment and broadcast brands based on their collective share of viewers across broadcast, cable, streaming and other platforms.
The monthly “The Gauge” report breaks things down on a per-platform basis, evaluating a company’s share of audience by broadcast, cable and streaming. The Desk typically evaluates the monthly share of traditional linear TV viewing by taking the sum of broadcast and cable TV’s share.
Changes to how Nielsen reports some streaming platforms based on their corporate owners have already lifted certain services over others. In January, the first month Nielsen began reporting Disney’s streaming services as a collective unit, the company third across streaming platforms by time spent with TV, pushing Amazon — which typically ranked third — into fourth place.
Likewise, Paramount’s streaming platforms now rank fifth overall, according to Nielsen’s March report. Last month, Paramount Plus was in eighth place with 1.3 percent of time spent with TV, while Pluto TV came in tenth with a solid 1 percent share of TV time. The March report showed Paramount’s collective share was 2.3 percent. That figure did not seem to take into account niche streaming services owned by Paramount like BET Plus.
WBD’s streaming platforms ranked eighth overall in March, ahead of Comcast’s Peacock but behind Fox-owned Tubi and The Roku Channel. In February, Max was ahead of Pluto TV.
