Key Points
- Nielsen delayed the February release of “The Gauge” after clients raised concerns about changes to its audience measurement methodology.
- Early results suggested broadcast and cable viewing rose in February due to the Super Bowl and Winter Olympic Games.
- The delay follows scrutiny from the Media Rating Council over Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement approach.
Nielsen will delay its planned release of its monthly snapshot report “The Gauge” after some of its clients expressed concerns over the methodology used to measure television audiences during February.
The report, which was due next week, is expected to show that traditional broadcast and cable television, as a whole, accounted for a larger amount of time spent with TV in American households compared to streaming apps and services during the February measurement period.
The increase in time spent with broadcast and cable TV was largely attributed to higher interest in NBC’s sports programming — the network offered Super Bowl LX and the Winter Olympic Games during the February measurement period, and those two events were widely viewed on its broadcast networks and associated cable channels. (Two networks owned by Versant, which was spun out of NBC Universal earlier this year, aired events from the Winter Olympics.)
The uptick was also connected to Nielsen’s use of new data from the ARF DASH TV Universe Study, which is compiled through a partnership with a non-profit research center at the University of Chicago. The Media Rating Council (MRC), which audits media measurements, accredited ARF DASH in February.
In a statement, Nielsen affirmed the MRC’s accreditation of the DASH universal estimates and said the MRC “overwhelmingly drove Nielsen’s swift adoption of DASH.”
“Over the course of several months, we communicated this change to our clients through product notifications, webinars and MRC meetings before it was implemented at the end of January,” the spokesperson said. “We believe that this change more accurately reflects the TV landscape.”
The decision to hold the upcoming report came after some Nielsen clients were given a preview of it, the spokesperson affirmed.
“When we began our standard monthly Gauge previews with clients this week, some clients requested additional data around DASH implementation. We will be providing them with that information,” the spokesperson said. “As a result, we are delaying the release of The Gauge one week to coincide with The Media Distributor Gauge release on March 24. We believe this will enable a smoother transition and give clients and the industry a better holistic view of February viewing.”
The Gauge offers a high-level view at traditional and streaming media consumption on TV each month. The report has been modified a handful of times over the past few years, largely to accommodate the interests of its major entertainment clients, with streaming apps from the Walt Disney Company, Paramount Global and Warner Bros Discovery now counted as a single unit instead of on a per-app basis.
That makes it more-difficult to determine which apps and services are resonating with consumers, without subscribing to products offered by Nielsen that offer more-granular insights into what apps people are using and what they are watching on them.
Another report, called the Media Distributor Gauge, evaluated TV consumption by reporting viewership across the collective products of major media companies, including broadcast and cable television.
In both reports, Nielsen often lists YouTube as the most-watched streaming app and the single media company with the biggest share of TV viewership on a monthly basis. Yet most of Nielsen’s reports are quiet on what content people are watching on YouTube, raising questions about how Nielsen chooses to compare it alongside other services.
The reports include data from Nielsen’s flagship media measurement product, called Big Data + Panel, which combines traditional broadcast and cable panels with first-party data collected from opt-in connected TV solutions like streaming boxes, cable set-top boxes, smart TVs and streaming apps.
Last week, the MRC publicly questioned Nielsen’s methodology, saying it was responsible for irregular audience estimates heading into the 2026-27 Upfront season.
“We understand, and we regret, that these changes will be disruptive to business processes of the marketplace; we are encouraged that Nielsen is actively working to address the priority areas for improvement that have arisen in their Big Data + Panel measurement,” the MRC said in its statement.
