Once upon a time, way back in 1950, Nielsen, the largest television audience measurement company in America, deemed a handful of families across the country “Nielsen families.”
These households recorded their television viewing habits in diaries that Nielsen collected during advertising sweep periods. In 1987, Nielsen adopted the People Meter, a black box that logged the number of television views in a given household. Flashing lights confirmed that the viewer was still watching every 15 to 20 minutes, and a Nielsen representative visited every few weeks to check up on household demographics such as employment and income.
Nielsen’s system had its flaws, from button fatigue to deliberate manipulation of numbers. But by creating a representative sample of the country, Nielsen provided advertisers and networks with reliable data on who was watching what.
Television has changed by leaps and bounds since the days of poodle skirts and TV dinners, when families gathered around a television set to pick from a few popular channels. Today’s evolving landscape includes DVRs that allow viewers to record television shows and online platforms that enable consumers to stream programs via the web. For instance, nearly 55 percent of viewers under 35 watched the Quantico premiere online in the week following the live airing, and 38 percent of the audience for Bob’s Burgers views the show on Hulu or on the Fox app. And a growing body of shows—from independently produced content to subscription-based programming from services like Netflix—exists solely on the Internet.
The Ratings Problem
In the midst of such dramatic changes, Nielsen is struggling to keep up. Although the technology has evolved, the basic principle has remained the same, relying on a just sample of the overall U.S. population—around 40,000 households—and a traditional television screen. Based on this data, Nielsen produces an overall viewership number and an 18-49 (age range) rating, which measures attention from this coveted advertising demographic. With the advent of DVR and video on demand, Nielsen started publishing not only Live+Same Day ratings, which count live viewership and recorded viewing on the airdate itself, but also Live+3, Live+7, and Live+30 ratings, which incorporate any recorded viewing within three, seven, and 30 days, respectively. Live+3 and Live+7 ratings are quickly becoming the primary figures that networks consider when evaluating their programming; Fox announced in December that it would no longer recognize Live+Same Day ratings.
But although emphasis on live viewership has decreased, Nielsen cannot yet accurately measure how many people watch content online. Online streaming of many broadcast shows is still not counted by Nielsen for purposes of ratings, although the company has begun to track 1,000 shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu (excluding mobile streams). Cathy Perron, who teaches television management at Boston University, explained to the HPR, “Other than going to a website for a particular broadcast network—so going to ABC.com to watch Scandal or something like that—there hasn’t really been a way to measure beyond that.” As matters stand, technology cannot accurately determine whether online viewers are in fact watching the programs for which they have pressed play. Nielsen has tried to integrate some internet data, such as Twitter and Facebook chatter, but the web poses another fundamental problem to audience measurement. As Philip Napoli, a professor at Rutgers University who has written several books on audience measurement, told the HPR, “The measurement online was always hampered by the fact that to deliver unified ratings, the program had to have the exact same commercials online versus on TV.” Until ratings can be equalized across platforms for advertisers, the Internet will remain a gap in Nielsen’s coverage.
The Network’s Dilemma
Nielsen’s shortcomings—particularly among viewers in the 18-49 demographic, who are more likely to watch television on mobile devices—have caused networks to reconsider the importance they place on ratings. Streaming services like Hulu may not factor into Nielsen results, but networks still receive money for selling shows to them. With streaming bringing in delayed waves of viewers at the same time as ratings are down across the board, networks are becoming more and more hesitant to cancel their shows, even if ratings are suffering. “In the old days you knew by the third or fourth week if a show truly had traction,” Mark Pedowitz, president of The CW, commented to the New York Times. “You’re now looking at seven or eight episodes before you get a determination.”
Drops in ratings throughout all of television are prime evidence of the degree to which consumption is changing. Streaming means fewer traditional and DVR viewers; Internet piracy means fewer viewers watching ads. Due to the emergence of Netflix and Amazon Prime, not to mention independent online productions, viewers have more and more choices when selecting shows. As a result, the very definition of a hit has changed drastically. The 2015-2016 season claims few blockbusters, and even those hits hardly amass the viewership that past successes garnered. NBC’s Blindspot—one of this year’s top shows, according to Slate—boasts an audience of eight million; in 1995, The Single Guy pulled in 20 million viewers and was still canceled after two seasons. According to NBC, Blindspot’s ratings double when mobile streams and delayed DVR viewings are added, but even an audience of 16 million is lower than the 20 million mark that didn’t cut it for The Single Guy.
As ratings drop and internet media grows ever more popular among young people whom advertisers seek to reach, change seems imminent. Aymar Jean Christian studies independent web series creators and their influence on the television industry at Northwestern University. In an interview with the HPR, he commented that “things are coming to a head in terms of the ratings being so bad on television that networks are really going to have to start working with the online broadcasters to make sure that these things are lining up.” Nielsen announced in 2006 that it would incorporate views from online and mobile systems, beginning with its “Anywhere, Anytime Media Measurement” initiative. A decade later, it appears that Nielsen is at last starting to fulfill its promise. “What’s in development at Nielsen is a new tool that will be available in October, I believe, and it is going to measure all platforms at all times,” explained Perron. “It’s going to count a ratings point as a ratings point all across those platforms, so there won’t be any, you know, ‘a ratings point is worth more if it’s on television versus if it’s viewed online versus if it’s viewed on mobile.’”
Networks have recently been giving up their initial attempts to air programs online with fewer ads and less frequent commercial breaks. Hulu has begun to give its programs the same ad slots that they receive on regular television, particularly within the Live+Same Day window, so that, for advertising purposes, an online viewer can be counted the same as a traditional one. Nielsen is also addressing the technological problem of tracking users online: with the help of acquisition eXelate, the company is developing ways to maintain unique user profiles across platforms. Christian said, “I can imagine, five years from now, that Nielsen has a new way of rating audiences that unifies TV, the web, and mobile, and ads are being sold in a different way, probably, that’s more immediate, more targeted.”
Looking Forward
As audience measurement changes, the market adapts alongside it. In many ways, television’s current period of transition is analogous to that of the 1980s, when the introduction of cable networks led to an explosion of viewing options. Cable networks did not become financially successful until Nielsen introduced People Meters to track viewer demographics, making demographic targeting economically viable. “If you can’t measure it and authenticate it, it’s very difficult to sell it,” noted Northwestern University’s James Webster, who researches media audiences, in an interview with the HPR.
But as ad-supported online viewing becomes more intertwined with traditional viewing, networks may begin to rethink their programming. According to Webster, when the entire population of online viewers (rather than a small sample) can be counted, data collection moves from a sample-based approach to a server-based approach. “One of the limitations of the old recipe of sampling is that as the environment gets more and more fragmented, as you have more and more small audiences looking at programs or channels, you run into a problem of sampling error.” The ability to count these smaller audiences means that as ratings techniques become more precise, in theory, niche programming will be able to better target its demographics.
Christian predicts that networks might begin to give their creators more control over content. Already, networks are more frequently ordering entire series rather than going through the expensive pilot process. “The only reason broadcasters haven’t given creators control over their content is because they’ve been dealing with marketing to big mainstream audiences,” Christian explained. “As their ratings go down … they’ll be able to act basically like cable networks and target niches and work with producers they feel will guarantee audiences quickly, as opposed to working with producers they think will be able to create the next Friends or ER.” The Northwestern scholar, having worked extensively with independent web series creators, sees networks reaching out to producers who have guaranteed large followings online, rather than those who have worked within the network system, yielding more distinctive, culturally specific programming. “I’m hoping that television becomes a lot looser and fresher and less kind of formulaic.”
The Internet has undoubtedly changed television, but just as television adapted to cable in the 1980s, television is evolving to meet this 21st-century challenge. After all, the industry exists to make money. Napoli noted, “People have been predicting for at least 15 to 20 years that at least one of the major broadcast networks … was going to give up being a broadcast network and become a cable network” in response to the market evolution that began in the ’80s—but none have. Instead, they started charging cable retransmission fees. “The broadcasters have become a sort of dual revenue stream business without a lot of us really knowing it.”
Broadcasters are similarly looking to monetize the Internet, and, in doing so, are changing the way that audiences are measured. Nielsen announced on April 4 that it would be collecting server-based direct viewing data from Dish, another piece of today’s fragmented television audience. As Nielsen makes concrete steps towards a unified ratings system, there is reason to believe that broadcasters will start looking to smaller, more demographically specific audiences. There will be monetary value in targeting niches. It is this sort of thinking that has already spawned new shows like Empire—with a mostly black cast and large black viewership—rather than shows like Friends, which attracted an enormous mainstream audience. If Nielsen ratings can capture the full breadth of what young people enjoy in an age when more options pop up every day, even broadcast television will have no reason to shy away from working with bright new creators and making television that caters to an America that has itself evolved since the days of the original black box.
Image Source: Wikimedia/David Hiser