NFL claims Nielsen undercounts its telecasts by ‘millions of viewers’

The NFL issued a rare reprimand of audience measurement firm Nielsen via a report in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

In the report, NFL Chief Data and Analytics Officer Paul Ballew told WSJ, “There are millions of viewers that we believe [Nielsen] are systematically undercounting.” The NFL, perhaps more than any other property on television, has a large incentive to ensure Nielsen accurately measures the number of people watching its telecasts.

For decades, Nielsen has been considered the gold standard in audience measurement. It is the currency by which the NFL sells its billions of dollars of rights to broadcast partners, and how those broadcast partners sell advertising inventory to marketers.

In recent years, Nielsen has revised its methodology to capture viewers watching television outside the home, in locations such as restaurants, bars, and hotels. Nielsen recently introduced another significant methodological change in preparation for the NFL season called “Big Data + Panel,” which will track smart TV data from 75 million connected devices to be used in conjunction with its traditional sample of 42,000 homes to create a more accurate estimation of viewership.

The common thread among these methodological changes is that viewership for live sports tends to increase compared to historical measurements. While the new Big Data + Panel measurements will be more accurate in a technical sense, they will complicate comparisons to prior seasons.

In particular, Ballew cited Nielsen’s failure to accurately capture “co-viewing,” a term used to describe multiple people watching the same screen, as a reason why NFL broadcasts were undercounted.

Per WSJ, the NFL has been experimenting with one of Nielsen’s competitors, VideoAmp, which specializes in tracking streaming audiences. VideoAmp is not accredited by the Media Ratings Council, which sets methodological standards for audience measurement. But the move certainly pressures Nielsen to be accommodating towards the NFL’s desires, nonetheless.

Bottom line, the NFL and its broadcast partners will continue to use Nielsen as the primary measurement firm for the foreseeable future, and Nielsen will remain the currency of the industry. However, with significant changes to the company’s methodology, expect NFL viewership and viewership for other live sports to see a substantial year-over-year increase.