Comparing anything to the infamous phone call President Donald Trump made at the end of his first term, seeming to cajole Georgia’s Secretary of State to magically find votes for him, 11,780 to be exact, is not meant to be flattering.
Put your politics aside and whatever your take is on that call, know that if someone is making the comparison, it’s meant as a jab. That’s what Fox Sports president of insights & analytics, Michael Mulvihill, did last week, comparing the vote request to YouTube’s amending upwards its viewership figure for its first NFL game stream, the September 5 tilt between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs in Brazil.
“So what are we going to do here folks?,” he tweeted. “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
Earlier, when YouTube put out the original, lower number, his counterpart at ESPN, Flora Kelly, tweeted, “Wish I could comment, but with no transparency into the methodology, I have no idea what these numbers mean. That’s the problem with an approach like this and why clear and transparent methodology matters.”
The issue is sensitive enough that neither Fox nor ESPN would provide further comment for this story. We’ll get to the YouTube dustup in a moment. But these concerns arrived as soon as the NFL went public with the belief that Nielsen is undercounting viewers.
So what gives? Why does it seem so many in sports are on edge about how to calculate the TV ratings?
A quick answer is traditional TV’s long-running frustration with how the digital world counts viewers. Additionally, Nielsen’s general method for calculating ratings changed this year, incorporating more out-of-home counting and utilizing a significantly larger dataset than it has historically collected from its previously smaller sample size, which was culled from groups of households.
But on another level, this is old news.
“This has been going on forever, I just think it just really got to people’s radar screens, because the press is looking for big positive streaming stories, and they were super excited about YouTube,” said Patrick Crakes, a sports media consultant and former Fox Sports executive. “Truth is, everybody’s always unhappy with Nielsen. There were at least three big attempts in my 24 years at Fox, of major initiatives within the industry to try to launch a competitor to Nielsen.”
Crakes recounted what he described as CBS Sports cherry picking data in the late 1990s to run promos in the middle of the season describing its NFL studio show as the number one using an archaic, but legal, “more people watch statistic which for a week or two would be accurate and then dissipate as the number of doubleheaders balanced out later in the season. Fox Sports bosses, David Hill and Ed Goren, “would call my office very concerned, they’re like,’They’re cheating’ how do we counter this? So we’d go out and complain to Nielsen.”
Meanwhile, the snarky imbroglio over YouTube is an inside baseball fight over how the ratings sausage is made. Typically, the ratings figures are handled by Nielsen through a process certified by the Media Rating Council, an industry group created in 1963 that sets standards and guidelines for determining TV ratings, and more recently streaming ratings. One requirement of an MRC-approved rating is that everything gets shared with competitors.
YouTube and Nielsen chose a non-MRC path; thus, ESPN’s Kelly and her tweet about the lack of transparency. The thorn just went deeper when YouTube amended its first figure higher (truth be told, the final 19.7 million viewership number is hardly outlandish, and some viewed it as actually a low outcome). Awful Announcing tried to get a comment from Google. A spokeswoman referred us to a general public relations email address, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Amazon Prime went through this when it first started streaming Thursday Night Football and went its own way using its own ratings methodology. But it long ago came aboard the industry-backed MRC train. Even Netflix changed its tune. “Remember, we’ve gone from Netflix saying that they would never use Nielsen to Netflix quoting Nielsen in their annual reports,” Crakes said. “Okay, that’s how far we’ve gone.”
One thing is clear: sports TV ratings are generally coming in higher with the advent of what Nielsen dubs its Big Data + Panel. The panel refers to the group of test homes that historically provided the information for Nielsen to deduce the ratings. The big data component originates from sources such as set-top boxes and internet-connected smart TVs, which are present in more than 45 million homes and 75 million devices. The new measurement system went into effect this month.
About Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan has been covering the business of sports for more than two decades. A proud founding reporter of SportsBusiness Journal, he spent the last four years at The Athletic.