Most television viewers have heard of Nielsen. For decades, Nielsen has been the industry standard for measuring TV audiences, but as viewing habits move online those traditional ratings have become less representative.
In response, Nielsen announced today that it will launch Digital Program Ratings. At launch, the service will partner with many major broadcasters and media companies, including A+E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery Communications, FOX, NBC and Univision.
This development is a natural evolution for both Nielsen and the networks that rely on accurate audience data. As viewing fragments across devices and platforms, reliable metrics are essential to evaluate a program’s performance and demonstrate its value to advertisers.
Although the initial launch includes only one web-exclusive streaming partner—AOL—Nielsen intends for the new ratings to cover viewing on major online platforms such as Hulu, YouTube, Yahoo and Netflix as measurement agreements and technical integrations progress.
Many series that proved popular with online audiences have not always been renewed, in part because online viewing was not routinely captured by traditional measurement systems. As more consumers use on-demand services and streaming devices as their primary source of entertainment, missing this data can obscure a show’s true reach.
That illustrates how influential Nielsen’s measurements remain across the industry. Alan Wurtzel, president of Research and Media Development at NBCUniversal, emphasized the importance of tracking viewing on tablets and other connected devices.
“We’re just not getting credit for it,” he said. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t sell it.”
The technology behind Digital Program Ratings builds on Nielsen’s existing Online Campaign Ratings, which deliver overnight metrics for online advertising. The new service expands those capabilities to reflect the rapid rise in tablet viewing and the growing use of set-top boxes and streaming devices.
Late last year, Nielsen introduced a Twitter TV rating system to capture social engagement around television, but social-based metrics alone are imperfect proxies for true audience size. Social mentions can indicate buzz, but they do not reliably quantify viewership across devices and platforms.
Nielsen’s expanded measurement does more than count unique viewers. It also reports user retention, demographic reach by age and gender, and the proportion of TVs and connected devices tuned to a program at any given time. These dimensions offer advertisers and programmers a fuller picture of who is watching and how they engage.
Across nearly every industry, analytics drive better decisions—revealing what works, what fails, and where to invest. For television and online video, improved measurement helps networks and advertisers optimize programming, placement, and monetization strategies.
As audiences continue to shift away from traditional linear viewing, Nielsen’s move to broaden its measurement capabilities is timely. Whether the update arrives soon enough to fully address the rapid changes in viewing behavior is an open question, but this step helps bridge the gap between legacy measurement systems and the diverse, device-driven landscape of modern video consumption.