TV ratings are on shaky ground

The “Yellowstone” finale drew 11 million viewers — maybe. Or maybe it was 8 million. It all depends on who was doing the counting and what they were counting.

Ratings have long been the currency of the TV business, helping to determine how much media companies can charge for commercials. But the $60 billion that advertisers spend on television each year largely depends on a shared leap of faith that the numbers are as good as gold.

That faith, though, is resting on shaky ground.

People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways — with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on-demand — that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership.

“It is more chaotic than it’s ever been,” said George Ivie, CEO of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog.

For decades, Nielsen’s measurement was the only game in town. But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability — at least at first — to measure how many people clicked play on those apps.

The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service, but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.

Over the past two years, as nearly all the major streaming services have introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the numbers they release make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.

Netflix discloses what it calls “hours viewed” for its shows. Prime Video and Max prefer to describe how many million “viewers” watched at least part of a show.

The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. But they also can lead to disagreements.

Take the new Amazon Prime Video reality series “Beast Games.” Amazon said the show amassed “more than 50 million viewers globally” in its first 25 days, which would suggest it was a runaway hit.

But the Entertainment Strategy Guy, an industry newsletter, tallied data from a wide range of third-party measurement groups and reached a different conclusion.

Stitching together statistics from Nielsen, YouTube, Google Trends, IMDb and more, the newsletter concluded that the show “is not a hit — no matter what data you look at or how you cut it.”

Nielsen has long relied on several thousand households to draw its estimates for what shows are watched. That group of households, which Nielsen calls a panel, has equipment installed at home. But during the pandemic, some of the households it tracked could not be serviced by Nielsen technicians, and the panel degraded.

Rival upstarts, including companies like VideoAmp, Samba, iSpot, Comscore and Luminate, began to pounce.

VideoAmp got a shot in the arm in recent months when Paramount — owner of CBS, the Paramount+ streaming app and cable networks like MTV and Comedy Central — got into an extended contract dispute over costs with Nielsen.

Paramount’s pivot to VideoAmp caused some confusion in the industry. After the Golden Globes, CBS announced that 10.1 million people had watched the show, citing VideoAmp data. A day later, Nielsen said only 9.3 million had tuned in.

Last month, in a move the company has described as a significant step, Nielsen also earned an accreditation for what it is calling its “Big Data + Panel” measurement, which will use intelligence from set-top boxes and smart TVs to supplement its panel measurements

Peter Olsen, who recently retired after two decades as a top ad sales executive for A&E Networks, said it would be in everyone’s interest to rally around a single calculation — from Nielsen or elsewhere.

“Let’s be honest, these ratings are kind of farcical in a way,” Olsen said. “The thought that was going to be 100% accurate? I don’t think anyone’s ever felt that way. But we need some type of agreed-upon third party industry currency” that everyone agrees on.