Nielsen Ratings To Count Online TV Viewing

cashman73 writes "Several sources are reporting that Nielsen is finally going to start measuring online TV viewing. You would think that this is a good idea, since many people are now watching TV programs on the Internet. However, there's a catch: Nielsen's new service will only count viewings of a program with the same number of advertisements as the network TV model. So, this immediately eliminates Hulu, as well as any shows watched via the network's own websites. As a matter of fact, it would currently only include Comcast's XFinity TV service, and TV Everywhere (which, so far, appears to be the equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever for television). So either, (a) everyone will rush out to watch their online TV on Comcast XFinity, so that their viewing counts in the ratings (unlikely), or (b) Hulu and everyone else starts to put more advertisements on their shows (more likely, but would also probably mean the death of Hulu)."

Comments

Nielsen Ratings

[Reason58]

I guess Conan should have had more commercials.

Wake me up when...

[Anita Coney]

...they count bittorrent views.

Re:Wake me up when...

[DavidTC]

I will second this completely.

I download TV illegally. But, first, let me explain what I won't do:
a) I'm not paying for shitty cable and for a TiVo when I already have computer hooked to my TV. Hell, technically, I do have free basic cable, and it's so poor I don't even have it actually hooked to my TV.
b) I don't really have enough bandwidth to stream. I get about 150kps download. That's really the lowest quality I can stand, too, so it works out to a minute of downloading per minute of video...which means that all streaming jumps to a lower quality, because that's too close to comfort. And forget about the higher quality stuff.
c) I want to control the entire thing with my remote control, and the streaming sites seem intent on not functioning in any HTPC interface anyway. (And I'm not sure how hacking hulu to watch in Boxee is somehow more 'moral' than just downloading the show.)
d) I am not paying for my TV shows in cash, hence I won't use iTunes. I will, like the rest of the world, pay in for TV in commercials. (When I pay in cash, I expect DVDs.) I won't promise to buy anything, but that never was part of the deal. And I'm really too lazy to bother with skipping them.

I'm not trying to morally justify anything, or claim I have the right to TV, I'm simply stating my situation, and stating as a member of the American people, I will watch TV. So I can either download TV illegally, or I can...um...hmmm...have no TV.

You give me a torrent I can download legally, I'm there.

I'd especially be there if you'd encrypt the episodes so I could download them in advance, and give me the key when they aired. I just mention that because that's how they should attract current illegal downloaders. Right now, it's end of episode+10 minutes+download time to watch. Let people have a download list, let them download the previous night, and then give them the key at the moment of airing. Unlike DRM, that actually could work with reasonable encryption, and lets people watch very high quality stuff even over bad connections. (Hell, you could technically watch about 5 hours a week over dialup, which would be helpful for people with basic cable who want to watch one or two other shows.)

But all this is, of course, crazy talk. If they provide digital downloads that people can actually download, why, people will download them, cut the commercials out, and redistribute them. (Which is a bit like worrying about someone breaking into your car by picking the trunk lock, when all actual thieves spend 30 seconds with a slim jim and get in from the doors.)

What is the point?

[capt.Hij]

Why do they insist on only measuring "full length" media. They will make themselves obsolete if they insist on measuring the way old media works. Related to that sentiment they forgot option "c," keep on ignoring the ratings and do what you like not what they want us to do.

Re:What is the point?

[TheRaven64]

Studios keep making bad business decisions based on Nielsen ratings. They cancel shows with low ratings even when the DVD sales alone are enough to make a profit on the show. Rather than make the next season straight-to-DVD, they don't make it at all.

Re:What is the point?

[EzInKy]

Studios keep making bad business decisions based on Nielsen ratings. They cancel shows with low ratings even when the DVD sales alone are enough to make a profit on the show. Rather than make the next season straight-to-DVD, they don't make it at all.

That's because they haven't yet learned that their current advertising methods are actually hurting viewership. I've bought quite a few DVD sets just so I don't have to suffer the bottom of the screen "popups" that seem to be the current fad nowadays. And you know, it wasn't long ago that an hour long episode provided you with 50 minutes of entertainment. Today it is more like 35.

Re:What is the point?

[DavidTC]

No shit.

Ratings were important when it was 'Which of these shows will take up valuable time on the channel?' We even talked about 'prime time'. If one show was making a profit of $500,000 an episode, and you thought a different one could make $600,000, sure, cancel the first.

But it's goddamn stupid when you stop living in the idiotic 'broadcast TV' world. You should make both shows. In fact, you should make anything that makes you money, or at least has a reasonable chance of doing so. Because it makes you money. I cannot stress the whole 'it makes you money' concept enough.

The sad thing is, TV networks already know about this. It was 'syndication' long before DVDs came out, wherein TV studios make shows without having a network committed to buying them. Although that market was a lot smaller, and shows had to be very low-budget to make a profit on just that.

Bu they already had the model. They should have logically been able to make the leap to DVDs.

A lot of the problem is how TV studios are structured. Everyone wants 'their own' shows to be wildly successful, so a) often don't care about show they get handed by other people, and b) don't care about 'small' money makers they have. (And, of course, apparently corporations have no fiscal responsibility to their stockholders, you know, actually make that $500,000.)

Everything is all about who is credited for the next big hit. No one actually cares who makes money. Film studios are completely dysfunctional.

The future is looking good, though. We've had independent film makers for quite some time, despite there being less stupidity in the film industry...and we're just starting to get independent 'TV studios' as it requires less and less upfront costs for equipment and whatnot.

Re:What is the point?

[TheRaven64]

I wish one of the producers like JMS or Joss Whedon, who produces popular shows but has a terrible relationship with the studios, would strike out on their own. Release pilots to the public. Tell everyone to share them as widely as possible. If you like it, invest $10 in the show. If enough people invest, the first season gets made. It's released on the Internet with a CC-NC-SA license and you're asked to share it with everyone. It's also sold on DVDs and to any TV networks that want to run it, for people who don't want to watch online. Money from these sales is split amongst the investors (after paying everyone involved in creating it), who are free to take it or reinvest it in the next season. Anyone who downloaded it and liked it is encouraged to invest $10 in the next season or, if it's run its course, in the creator's next project.

The current model for selling content is completely broken. You need some third party to invest a lot of money in the expensive and difficult bit (creating a show that's worth watching in the first place) and then you try to recoup this later by charging for the cheap bit (creating copies, which anyone with $100 consumer-grade equipment can do). If this wasn't the established model, and you tried to convince someone that it was a good idea, then they'd laugh at you.

Makes sense

[loftwyr]

After all, Nielsen reports ratings so that shows can sell more advertising. If the show you're watching doesn't have the same number of ads, then it's useless in terms of advertising sales as it's not apples to apples.

Nobody in advertising cares if 500,000,000 people watch a show if no ads were seen.

Re:Makes sense

[kannibal_klown]

After all, Nielsen reports ratings so that shows can sell more advertising. If the show you're watching doesn't have the same number of ads, then it's useless in terms of advertising sales as it's not apples to apples.

Nobody in advertising cares if 500,000,000 people watch a show if no ads were seen.

True, I can see where they're coming from. However I would imagine counting online views as a portion/percentage.

For example a typical show on Hulu has the same number of commercial breaks as the broadcast equivalent, but maybe 1/5 of the total commercials. IE, for every break there's usually a single 15-60 second commercial (averaging around 30 seconds a piece). So maybe count 5 Hulu viewings as 1 Nielson viewing.

Then you have paid online content... if an obscene number of viewers are paying iTunes for Show X then that should somehow be aggragated with ratings. After all, the network just received a chunk of change from those sales.

Re:Makes sense

[ktappe]

Nobody in advertising cares if 500,000,000 people watch a show if no ads were seen.

They do if ads can be added to the show in the future. I'd be very interested in such data if I were searching for a place to stick an ad. I'd be especially interested if I could be the only ad in the show, so my ad would stick out instead of being lost among the others. As such, I think Nielsen is being moronic here--advertisers on limited-ad broadcasts should be eager for such data and therefore so should the content producers.

Re:Makes sense

[FlyingBishop]

Bull. I straight up do not see (or hear) half of the ads that come up on television.

Most ads on Hulu, by contrast, I do see. So ignoring Hulu is ridiculous.

Re:Makes sense

[nightsweat]

Not really. fewer ads in a Hulu broadcast might be worth more as far as the depth of impression made. If you watch "Accidentally on Purpose" on TV, you might watch it because you like Jenna Elfman and think the show is funny. Or, you might just happen to be killing time between "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Big Bang Theory". Neilsen can't tell.

If, however, you watch Accidentally on Purpose on Hulu, it's because you want to watch Accidentally on Purpose. The ads that are targeted to that crowd are more narrowly and more properly targeted to you the Hulu viewer and shoudl be be more valuable per impression.

Re:Makes sense

[ottothecow]

Ahh, but hulu advertisers do not care about the popularity of the program.

Hulu advertisers get a guaranteed number of viewers and they can try to target specific audiences (not sure how much targeting hulu does). With traditional advertising, you buy a time block and then you hope that people are going to watch it. If the football game on another channel goes into double overtime and half of your expected viewers show up...tough cookies. If only half of the viewers show up on hulu, you only run half the amount of ads.

From that standpoint, I understand why Nielsen is doing it this way...but at the same time, their ratings end up being factors in other things (like whether or not a show gets canned) and thus they should be reporting on every medium they can. How hard would it be to add a media_source: field in their database and have different advertising and viewership statistics?

At the same time, why do we need Nielsen for online content? The page counter has existed since the geocities page--We need Nielsen because they can tell us who is watching what OTA broadcast...hulu can already tell us exactly how many times something was watched and probably exactly what parts of the program they watched.

Re:Makes sense

[mounthood]

Bittorrent should be counted for the another reason: if someone is taking the time to download it we can be very sure they are watching it, unlike the TV show that may be on without anybody paying attention. Turing that interest into revenue is still a challenge, but it's not made harder by counting torrents; it wouldn't condone or justify torrents only make the rating numbers more accurate.

Re:Makes sense

[Rich0]

I think it depends on what you're using the metrics for. I'd argue that they should collect everything, and then categorize it appropriately.

For example, suppose Hulu announces that they'll take one high-cost ad per show. Suddenly advertisers will want to know what their market share is and all that.

On the other hand, when networks decide what shows to cancel - they don't care about how many people watch the show on mediums other than their own, regardless of whether they have ads or not.

I suspect that the reason that Neilsen is doing what it is doing is that it is because it is what their customers are looking for. When Hulu pitches their online service to an ad agency they don't need Neilsen to tell them how many people are watching their shows - they already collect that stuff on their own.

Re:Makes sense

[TheRaven64]

No, iTunes will count like DVD sales. It's money made from the consumers rather than money made from the advertisers. Nielsen only tracks money made from the advertisers. Unfortunately, the studios seem obsessed by advertising revenue and don't seem to have noticed that, since DVD made recordings cheap to mass produce and the Internet made them even cheaper, it's possible to sell directly to the consumers and still make a profit.

Re:Makes sense

[Maximum Prophet]

Nobody in advertising cares if 500,000,000 people watch a show if no ads were seen.

Wrong. They care because that's where the next opportunities to sell ads are.

I don't understand Neilsen's plan. How will advertisers know where their ads *should* go, if they don't have all the numbers.

Re:Makes sense

[jayme0227]

Actually, many television shows are moving towards product placement instead of traditional advertising. Most companies understand that the normal TV model is a thing of the past, considering that many people have DVRs and now stream TV online.

If you have ever seen the show "Chuck" on NBC, you would see quite a bit of this. For one, part of the show often takes place in an electronics retail store which allows considerable ads to be placed around the store in the form of cardboard cutouts and product displays. Video games are often topics for conversation, including major promotions from Call of Duty and Madden NFL 10 being incorporated (extremely cleverly, I might add) into the storyline. In addition to video games and cars (which have been doing product placement for years), Subway has stated that their product placement with Chuck was one of their most successful ad partnerships ever.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter whether Nielsen includes steaming content in their ratings. Any network that streams its own shows should have access to their data without a problem, and if Hulu doesn't already provide this data back to the networks, I doubt it would make much for them to do so. Any ad exec that still bases his decisions solely on Nielsen ratings at this point doesn't deserve his job.

PS. Watch Chuck. It's a fantastically done spy comedy that always finds its way to cleverly tell a story, even if its premise is a bit old. (Unwitting everyman accidentally gains "superpowers" and must learn to become a hero.)

Re:Makes sense

[barberousse]

What about product placement? More viewings (whatever the medium) = more potential revenue for the advertisers.

Why would Hulu need Nielsen Ratings?

[Van Cutter Romney]

Unlike traditional TV where you need ratings like Nielsen, to get advertisers, Hulu could just show the traffic that comes to their site.

Re:Worth it?

[denmarkw00t]

So? "OH EM GEE OUR NEILSENS DROPPED"

Seriously, just measure your rating some other way - if you can get a count of viewers from Hulu's site then why even care about Neilsen? I understand they're quite the benchmark for TV, but if you're going to come to the nets you can't just change the rules because of your ties to TV counts - Hulu and other sites already provide stats, why change their model to fit TVs?

You need to realize something about ad execs.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to realize that managers these days, especially those in extremely abstract fields like advertising, spent a large chunk of their time looking at and "analyzing" various "metrics".

It's one thing when you're managing a factory, for instance. There are metrics there, too, but they are actually useful. You can track how many items you've manufactured in a given time period, how much labor was required to manufacture those items, how many are defective, the per-unit cost of each item, and so forth. Such metrics are useful and accurate because they correspond very well to reality. A manager who knows such metrics can make more educated decisions.

That's just not the case for many other managers in different fields. Like this article discusses, the metrics dealt with in advertising are much sketchier. Sometimes they exclude huge segments of reality. Other times, they're slightly better than pure nonsense.

To try and look useful, such managers go crazy with the analysis of this shitty data. They get developers to build them "dashboards" so they can watch their bullshit numbers fluctuate in real-time. Then they try to make decisions on this half-assed information, and of course make stupid decisions. But it looks like they're hard at work, and so they get the big bucks.

Re:Why do you say this?

[Rutefoot]

Here in Canada we don't even get Hulu. For me, I would not care in the slightest if online shows contained the same number of advertisements as broadcast TV if it means we were actually allowed to watch it. I would love the opportunity to be able to watch a streaming show without having to deal with the unreliability and sketchiness of less than official streaming video sites.

One other thing that I don't think was mentioned is the ability for online sites to very easily offer advertisements targetted at people depending on where they live. Big networks don't get that luxury. I mean, take TBS for example which often contains ads for local Atlanta businesses. Those ads are valueless for 90%+ of viewers. An online site could potentially sell the same ad space many times over, one directed at Atlanta residents, one to west coasters, one to Canadians, etc. They might have to charge slightly less just on principle, even if it has close to zero effect on the ad's reach, but sell that ad space 5 times and you could make significantly more profits.

We'll see

[markdowling]

"We have freed ourselves from television, and we have advertisers' greed to thank for that. We don't miss TV one bit"

When it comes to fiancehood, past performance is not an indicator of future returns.

Re:true

[KharmaWidow]

I care about the subject because Nielsen Ratings are the industry standard - for good or for bad. It is way too often that good shows are canceled in favor of bad ones when Nielsen doesn't have significant ratings for them (ie Firefly). Yet these shows have proven to be hugely popular online.

Plus, the fact that they are limiting to shows with 3 min advertising blocks may doom the online model of much shorter intervals. Nielsen is intentionally overlooking an ample data source from sites like Hulu and the network sites, themselves. This only appears to be some sort of industry conspiracy.

Re:Worth it?

[im_thatoneguy]

Well if I were an exec I would ask my secretary to get some 'computer guy' in to provide me with a compilation of how much I made from advertising the night before based on as many sources of revenue as possible.

If Hulu charges more per second let me know and take it into account. Create a normalized set of data so I can see how many viewed my program, how that compares to other networks and where we could extract more revenue.

Last night you had:
2m viewers estimated on broadcast. That means we made $.003 per viewer.
100,000k viewers watched it on Hulu. We made $.001 per viewer.
etc...

Re:Worth it?

[johnathan]

It is hard to understate the importance of Neilsen numbers in Hollywood.

I don't think that means what you think it means.