Measuring and reporting the impact of online media's viewership of broadcast and cable TV programs will be center stage at a private Nielsen confab next Friday (Oct. 16) in New York City, reports MediaDailyNews. The blog says only a handful of Nielsen's "most influential clients" will be participating in what Nielsen execs say is equal in import to a 2006 meeting that established a measure of time-shifted viewing data. That meeting helped establish the C3 ratings used to negotiate their national TV advertising buys.
Although Nielsen has said it has no plans to take immediate action, Broadcast & Cable reported the meeting would allow clients like Procter & Gamble and Time Warner, as well as several media agencies, to lay out what they want to see in relation to measuring online audience viewing patterns.
Nielsen invested $1 billion in multi-screen audience measurement, and at the same time, the company financed a Council for Research Excellence report that contends online video usage was dramatically overstated.
Only some 400 households currently provide metrics on online viewing of TV programming to Nielsen, but the company is looking to meld that into its official ratings garnered from the 18,000 households it measures. Nielsen also measures the rapidly expanding mobile viewing market but has not integrated those numbers into its rating sample.
Online audience numbers--and their impact on the industry--remain a hot topic, as a recent Nielsen-Hulu brouhaha clearly showed.
For more:
- see this MediaDailyNews story
- see this Broadcasting & Cable story
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Nielsen testing TV, online video ratings combo
Nielsen invested $1 billion in multi-screen measurement