Nielsen, playing catch-up, has a plan to start incorporating some viewership of television shows on phones and tablets into its industry-standard TV ratings system in the fall of 2014.
The company’s plan, previewed in news reports on Thursday, will be formally announced next week at the Advertising Week conference in New York. It is a response to the requests — and sometimes outright pleas — from networks for a more complete accounting of viewership.
While most TV consumption still happens through traditional TV sets, more and more people are watching on other screens, like smartphones. Networks have been pressuring Nielsen to include those people in the ratings reports that calibrate advertising rates and influence the perceptions of success and failure.
So Nielsen will, but not until this time next year. The company said that was a reflection of the extensive behind-the-scenes work that is required.
By revealing the timeline now, at the start of the fall season, Nielsen may be trying to calm the nerves of clients.
Nielsen executives were not available for interviews on Thursday afternoon. But in a previously-scheduled interview with Variety, the company’s senior vice president for global audience measurement, Eric Solomon, acknowledged that networks “are starving for a number they can publish that really represents their audience not just on TV but across all platforms.”
Once some mobile viewing is included in the ratings totals, Mr. Solomon said: “I think it will start changing the narrative that people are not watching TV shows. It’s that they’re watching on different platforms.”
Because Nielsen ratings exist mainly for the buying and selling of TV advertising time, the expansion plan does not include ad-free streaming services like Netflix, which mainly carries previous seasons of shows. Nor does the plan initially include Hulu, the streaming service jointly owned by the parent companies of ABC, Fox and NBC, because the ads that are streamed on Hulu differ from the ads on TV.
But Nielsen will measure online streams of shows that have exactly the same ads in the same order as the TV broadcasts of those shows. For example, people who watch “Scandal” via ABC’s streaming app or Time Warner Cable’s app would be newly counted in Nielsen’s TV ratings. People who watch “Scandal” via Netflix or Hulu would not.
Will Somers, the head of research at Fox, was encouraged by Nielsen’s plan. But like his counterparts at other networks, he hinted at a little impatience: he said Fox hoped Nielsen “can bring comprehensive and scalable multiplatform measurement services to market as quickly as possible.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/media/nielsen-will-add-mobile-viewership-to-ratings.html?partner=rss&emc=rss