Monday, January 27, 2025

Nielsen to End Panel-Only TV Ratings


Media measurement firm Nielsen will stop selling its stand-alone consumer panel-based TV ratings in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a memo sent from Nielsen to ad-buyers and confirmed to The Wall Street Journal by the company. The panel-only product has for decades served as the standard for measuring U.S. television ratings, which programmers use to set ad prices and advertisers rely on to know whether they got what they paid for.

Nielsen wants customers to begin fulfilling those needs using a newer ratings product called Big Data + Panel, which combines the panel-based consumer data with numbers drawn from third-party vendors such as smart TV manufacturers. The company on Wednesday said Big Data + Panel had received accreditation from the Media Rating Council, the media industry’s measurement watchdog, and that it would endorse the product as the “currency” at this year’s upfront marketplace for TV inventory.

Nielsen has been hoping to move its customers to its updated ratings product for years, promising in 2020 that it would take away traditional panel-only ratings in 2024 “and just do it in this new way,” as its then-chief executive said at the time. It changed its plans last year after pushback from advertisers and agencies that said the transition felt rushed.

But Nielsen is still eager to make the shift, partly so it can better compete with rivals such as VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot.tv that have focused more directly on digital measurement technology. At this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Disney debuted a product called Compass that is designed to help ad buyers more easily access data drawn from the company’s own customers. The system is compatible with a list of measurement vendors that doesn’t include Nielsen.

Nielsen is also in the midst of a public dispute with longtime client Paramount, the owner of the CBS broadcast network and the Paramount+ streaming service, which did not renew its contract with Nielsen last year due to disagreements over its cost. Paramount has been negotiating with Nielsen to strike a new deal, but this month also renewed its contract with VideoAmp.


Nielsen remains the dominant player in ad measurement primarily because of the size of its legacy market share, according to buyers. Switching entirely to a new ratings product at this year’s upfronts, the annual ritual in which buyers and sellers negotiate deals for the next TV season, would require sellers to recalculate their pricing models and force buyers to adjust their plans, they said.

Sixty percent of marketers used a Nielsen alternative in 2024, although they may have used Nielsen as well, according to a November survey from market intelligence firm Advertiser Perceptions. Forty-nine percent of those said the newer entrants were as effective as Nielsen’s products and 36% called them more effective, the survey found.

Most agencies, which handle the majority of ad buying, cannot afford to work with more than one measurement vendor, especially because prices are rising at a time when all media companies are looking to cut costs, according to one buyer at a major agency network.

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