This column was originally published at Multicast News, which shares common ownership with The Desk.
On Friday, YouTube said audience figures related to its global distribution of a National Football Game last week was off by around 2 million viewers because of an internal technical issue. It upwardly adjusted the viewership count to 19.7 million — far less than what NBC pulled in for its earlier NFL Kickoff game the prior day, which the network only offered through its broadcast channel and streaming service Peacock in the United States.
YouTube said its new numbers were provided to and validated by Nielsen. But, before the game took place, there were questions about why Nielsen was providing YouTube the ability to report and verify its data differently than other clients:
Executives in charge of data and analytics at Fox Sports and Disney-owned ESPN publicly criticized Nielsen for catering to YouTube by creating a special version of its measurement product that weren’t available to other clients.
“Nielsen’s measurement of tonight’s YouTube game will not be made available to other Nielsen clients, a flagrant departure from Nielsen’s history of transparency and a slap in the face to longstanding clients,” Mike Mulvihill, the President of Insight and Analytics at Fox Sports, said in a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter).
Mulvihill acknowledged that Nielsen’s measurement products were not perfect — something that Nielsen has acknowledged in the past, and vowed to fix with its Big Data + Panels product, which combines its traditional household surveys with first-party data from connected TV apps and services.
But what made Nielsen the gold standard for television measurement was its commitment to transparency, something that Mulvihill said the company wasn’t doing with respect to YouTube and its NFL game.
“Their value comes from impartiality and transparency,” Mulvilhill said. “When they move away from those tenets they undermine what makes them the only essential data source in media.”
Flora Kelly, the Senior Vice President of Research at ESPN, put it more bluntly: “Their rating is not a fair comp.”
Speaking to Front Office Sports, a Nielsen spokesperson affirmed the company was using a different reporting and measurement system, because YouTube didn’t have enough time to “have proper audience inputs for its accredited workflow, particularly relating to first-party streaming data.”
But, as I wrote at The Desk earlier today, that excuse doesn’t hold up in light of Nielsen’s monthly The Gauge reports, which apparently include enough data from YouTube to proclaim it the top streaming app on a regular basis.
On its monthly “The Gauge” report, Nielsen regularly counts YouTube as the top streaming platform in terms of time spent with TV. Over the past six months, YouTube has also ranked as the top distributor of media in a separate but related “Monthly Distributor Gauge” report published by Nielsen. In both cases, YouTube ranks higher than streaming apps from Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Paramount and other companies; on “The Gauge,” YouTube’s prominence helps the “streaming” category achieve a higher collective share over broadcast and cable TV.
It is clear from those reports that Nielsen does have the ability to count YouTube, though it isn’t clear if the company can determine what people are specifically watching on the app. While Nielsen offers big-picture insight into the shows and genres people watch on streaming apps and linear TV through its Gauge report each month, it usually doesn’t specify what content is attracting people to YouTube.
In August, The Desk sent a list of questions to Nielsen inquiring about the methodology it uses to evaluate YouTube viewership — a list that was re-sent to a Nielsen spokesperson in light of comments made by ESPN and Fox Sports executives last week. The spokesperson has not returned a request for comment.
For years, Nielsen rested on the monopoly it built in measuring broadcast and cable channels through its household panels — asking people to write down what they watched, and then using that information to gauge what the rest of the country likely watched at a given time.
In the era of streaming, that data is much easier to come by: Each streaming service collects, analyzes, measures and reports data in its own way. Nielsen has worked to streamline that effort, but it is largely beholden to each service providing access to that data or otherwise reporting it in a standard way. Some connected TV platforms and streaming apps have chosen not to do this, which only adds more confusion.
YouTube appears to be part of that problem, as evident by their special treatment over the past week and their ability to correct data that they claim — without proof — was erroneous. At a time when some industry experts and pundits claim that “YouTube is TV,” that seems like something that really needs to be corrected, rather than just accepted by Nielsen as a standard business practice.
There is one thing that is certain: Next week, when Nielsen releases its monthly “The Gauge” report for the August measurement period, YouTube will be the top streaming platform by share of time spent with TV. In light of Nielsen and YouTube’s recent missteps, it will be interesting to see whether the industry accepts the report as gospel or start to question it.
