YouTube says a technical glitch led it to reporting erroneous viewership numbers for its global telecast of a National Football League game last week.
In a report released earlier this week, YouTube claimed the number of people who watched the match-up between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Chargers in Brazil was 17.3 million.
On Friday, YouTube acknowledged that count was off by more than 2 million viewers, on account of an internal “technical glitch” that led it to under-report the NFL’s viewership to Nielsen.
The actual number of people who watched the telecast around the world was 19.7 million, YouTube said in an updated post.
“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.”
Related: When did Nielsen become part of YouTube’s publicity department? (Multicast News)
Even before the game started, there were questions about YouTube and Nielsen’s methodology with respect to counting viewership. 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.”
A source at Nielsen told Front Office Sports that Nielsen was, indeed, using a different method to count viewership for YouTube’s NFL event than what was offered to other clients. The reason? YouTube didn’t have enough time to “have proper audience inputs for its accredited workflow, particularly relating to first-party streaming data.”
That excuse is extremely difficult to believe. 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.
It isn’t just sports rights holders that are aggrieved by Nielsen: Earlier this month, a data executive with the NFL accused Nielsen of under-counting viewership to its games, though he said the company was working through the issue in a way that was encouraging.
Broadcasters appear to be less encouraged. At industry conferences, data and advertising executives frequently discuss the likelihood of a “post-Nielsen world,” where the storied measurement firm is just one of several places where broadcasters and content distributors can collect ratings and insights that are used as currency to set ad rates.
Some broadcasters are making progress toward that future becoming a reality: Two years ago, Nexstar Media Group — the largest owner of network-affiliated broadcast stations — signaled its interest in moving away from Nielsen when it issued a public proposal to find “a next-generation audience measurement partner.”
“We believe current methods of audience measurement inadequately reflect our national reach and the effectiveness of the local activation we deliver to advertisers and marketers,” Michael Strober, then Nexstar’s Chief Revenue Officer, said in a statement. (Strober left Nexstar last year; Nexstar continues to use Nielsen data.)
Paramount has also expressed concerns over Nielsen: The CBS broadcaster broke away from Nielsen last October after a contract to use its measurement data expired without a new agreement in place.
In a statement, a Paramount advertising executive accused Nielsen of raising its prices despite the company’s failure to address “the changing economic landscape of our industry.”
“Nielsen’s costs as a percentage of Paramount ad revenue have quintupled over significant parts of our business over the last years; in certain instances, Nielsen’s fees already exceed the total advertising revenue of the network being measured,” the Paramount executive said. “This has led us to conclude that the model, as proposed, is not workable, and that the cost structure requires re-engineering.”
