The Nielsen ratings have long held huge sway over the business of television, but television isn’t like it used to be. So, on Tuesday, Nielsen announced that it’s expanding its ratings system to all kinds of digital content to give both its creators and advertisers a more meaningful way to measure popularity in the online era.
The most striking development in Adobe’s new system is that it’s designed for comparing disparate kinds of content. The new ratings, Nielsen says, can rank an online video next to a podcast next to an article. Unlike television or radio, the internet isn’t a medium that funnels just one format. The aim of Nielsen’s new ratings is to create a context to figure out what people care about online, regardless of what form it takes.
The online rating system will combine Nielsen formulas with data from Adobe’s online traffic-measuring and internet TV software. Many of the largest traditional TV networks have already signed up, among them ESPN, Univision, Sony, Viacom, and Turner Broadcasting. While such a roster might sound like a list of clients who mostly want to know their shows are doing online, Adobe product management director Ashley Still points out that a network like ESPN is about a lot more than shows.
“If you think of espn.com, they get a lot of traffic and they sell a lot of advertising,” Still says. And little of that traffic is for what could be considered traditional TV. The site brims with articles and short-form video. A similar case could be made for CNN, which is owned by Turner. “This is not just about watching ESPN,” Still says. “This definitely is about all content types.”
Putting the Pieces Back Together
But the difficulty with a medium like the internet capable of delivering so many content types is how to compare those types to one another. Traditional TV ratings made a kind of intuitive sense, since it was all about who was watching and when—at least until DVRs came along and muddied everything. But the profound fracturing of the media landscape unleashed by the internet has forced a deep rethinking of the concept of popularity itself.
Is popularity on the internet the number of clicks? Page views? Unique visitors? Length of time spent on a site? Distance scrolled on a page? Return visits? How many times a video is watched through to the end? How many times an ad turns into an online purchase? Such uncertainty is the source of deep unease across the media and entertainment worlds, not to mention the industries that buy the ads that fund them. If how to measure popularity isn’t obvious, how can anyone know what an ad is worth?
“We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days,” wrote Tony Haile, CEO of real-time web-traffic data company Chartbeat, in Time earlier this year in piece headlined “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong.” “We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again.”
By pulling together data from online TV and video, games, audio, and text across all the devices used to consume all of that content, Nielsen and Adobe are looking for a way to take all of those fragments and piece them together to create a picture that makes sense the way old media did. Whether it will work is a separate question, but the impetus to try won’t go away soon. The old way made a lot of people in old media a lot of money. If someone can approximate the old way for new media, maybe more of that money will start rolling in, just like it used to.
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