Nielsen has amended the viewership figures for one of its client streaming services for the second time in less than a week.
On Tuesday, Nielsen adjusted the total time spent with Paramount-owned streaming services in July, which was initially reported in its “The Gauge” report to have accounted for 1.9 percent of time spent with television during the measurement period.
The actual amount was a flat 2 percent — the same share attributed to Paramount-owned streaming services in Nielsen’s most-recent report for the August measurement period.
In an e-mail, a Nielsen spokesperson attributed the error to an undercount in viewership for Paramount Plus, Paramount’s flagship streaming platform. The spokesperson characterized the miscount as “very small,” but said it was enough to cause a rounding error, which pushed Paramount’s total share of TV time to the next tenth of a percentage point.
Nielsen began counting Paramount Plus with BET Plus and Pluto TV as “Paramount streaming” in April; it does the same with services owned by Disney and Warner Bros Discovery.
The mistake involving Paramount’s viewership count is the second involving Nielsen and a major streaming platform over the past week.
Last Friday, Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube revised the viewership for its National Football League (NFL) game in Brazil, saying the game attracted 19.7 million viewers, a figure that was more than 2 million viewers higher than earlier reported.
“We’ve revalidated the numbers with Nielsen, after providing them with the updated first party data,” a YouTube spokesperson wrote in the post. “This is an unfortunate situation, and we’ll do better next time.”
Prior to the game, there were questions about the validity of Nielsen’s measurement of the NFL game, with executives from Fox and ESPN criticizing the data firm for providing YouTube with a novel method to evaluate its audience count that wasn’t available to other TV clients.
Earlier, a data executive with the NFL said Nielsen’s historical reliance on panel-based measurement under-counted the audience of its games aired by the four biggest TV networks, but said Nielsen’s products were improving.
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