Last month, the Golden Globes drew 10.1 million viewers. No, wait, maybe 9.3 million.
The very same night, “Sunday Night Football” attracted 28.5 million people. Scratch that, perhaps it was 25.8 million.
The “Yellowstone” finale? Possibly 11 million — or 8 million?
Ratings have long been the currency of the TV business, helping to determine how much media companies can charge for commercials. But the $60 billion that advertisers spend on television each year largely depends on a shared leap of faith that the numbers are as good as gold.
That faith, though, is resting on shaky ground.
People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways — with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on-demand — that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership. In some cases, media executives and advertisers are even uncertain whether a competitor’s show is a hit, or something well short of that.
The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since.
“It is more chaotic than it’s ever been,” said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog.
For decades, there was no dispute — Nielsen’s measurement was the only game in town.
But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability — at least at first — to measure how many people clicked play on those apps. The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.
Over the past two years, as nearly every major streaming service has introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.
Netflix discloses what it calls “hours viewed” and “views” for its shows. Prime Video, as well as Max, prefer to describe how many million “viewers” watched a hit of their choosing.
The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.
Take the new Amazon Prime Video reality series, “Beast Games,” starring the YouTube personality, MrBeast. Amazon said that the show amassed “more than 50 million viewers globally” in its first 25 days, making it the streamer’s most-watched unscripted series ever, which would suggest it was a runaway hit.
But the Entertainment Strategy Guy, an industry newsletter, recently tallied up data from a wide range of third-party measurement groups and reached a different conclusion. In the post, which analyzes viewership in the United States, the newsletter stitched together statistics from Nielsen, YouTube, Google Trends, IMDb and more.
The newsletter’s conclusion? The show “is not a hit — no matter what data you look at or how you cut it — but it also isn’t a flop or bomb either.”
Nielsen, which was bought by private equity in 2022, has long relied on several thousand households across the country to draw its estimates for what is watched on hundreds of television networks on a minute-to-minute basis. That group of households, which Nielsen calls a panel, has equipment installed at home, and those numbers are used to estimate ratings of different demographic groups — breaking down the numbers by age, income, gender or race.
But during the pandemic, some of the households it tracked could not be serviced by Nielsen technicians given stay-at-home orders, and the panel rapidly degraded. In 2021, the Media Rating Council stripped the company of its accreditation, a seal-of-approval that the media and advertising industries monitor closely.
Rival Nielsen upstarts, including companies like VideoAmp, Samba, iSpot, Comscore and Luminate, began to pounce.
Some of the upstarts have relied on so-called big data, using intelligence from set-top boxes and smart TVs to best determine a ratings estimate.
“They’re bringing an abacus to an A.I. fight,” said Peter Liguori, a longtime media executive and the executive chairman of VideoAmp, said about Nielsen. “They’re moving the beads from one side of the abacus to the other, and we’re using tech and big data and A.I.-machine learning to create the most refined, highest fidelity, highly credible measurement system.”
A Nielsen spokesman said: “VideoAmp is known for its inaccuracy, and their criticism of us is no exception. Nielsen has been using proprietary machine learning and advanced artificial intelligence for years.”
VideoAmp got a shot in the arm in recent months when Paramount, the owner of CBS, the Paramount+ streaming app, and cable networks like MTV and Comedy Central, got into an extended contract dispute with Nielsen.
Paramount complained that Nielsen’s prices were too high, going as far to say that the measurement firm’s fees exceeded the advertising revenue of some of its cable channels. Nielsen can charge a midsize media company roughly $50 million a year, and that price can balloon to $300 million a year for a much larger company.
Paramount’s pivot to VideoAmp caused some confusion in the industry. After the Golden Globes, CBS announced that 10.1 million people watched the show, citing VideoAmp data. A day later, Nielsen said only 9.3 million tuned in.
Last Monday, Paramount ended its four-month standoff with Nielsen and signed a new contract, saying it was “incredibly pleased” to do so.
Nielsen has said that it has taken the necessary steps to adjust to the new media landscape. The company publicly discloses all sorts of streaming ratings data now. And it earned back its Media Rating Council seal-of-approval in 2023. Last month, in a move the company has described as a significant step, Nielsen also earned an accreditation for what it is calling its “Big Data + Panel” measurement, which will use intelligence from set-top boxes and smart TVs to supplement its panel measurements of 42,000 households. (VideoAmp is not yet accredited by the rating council.)
“In a world where there’s so much data, and so many opportunities for people to push their own narrative, I think Nielsen is even more important than ever,” said Michelle Gelman, the senior vice president of product at Nielsen.
Brian Wieser, an industry analyst, said that there has long been a desire among advertisers to find a Nielsen alternative but the vast majority of deals use Nielsen data.
“Many marketers have long had frustrations with Nielsen, and there was always this latent desire among many stakeholders to see competitors to Nielsen,” he said. “At the same time, Nielsen’s superiority was pretty clear.”
Peter Olsen, who recently retired after two decades as a top ad sales executive for A&E Networks, said it will be in everyone’s interest to rally around a single calculation — from Nielsen or elsewhere.
“Let’s be honest, these ratings are kind of farcical in a way,” Mr. Olsen said. “The thought that was going to be 100 percent accurate? I don’t think anyone’s ever felt that way. But we need some type of agreed-upon third party industry currency that we can just transact on.”