Nielsen Playing Catch-Up as TV Viewing Habits Change and Digital Rivals Spring Up

Nielsen, the 93-year-old company that has long operated an effective monopoly over television ratings in the United States, is facing blistering criticism from TV and advertising executives who see it as a relic of television’s rabbit-ears past as the digital revolution transforms how people consume entertainment. New competition — notably the $768 million merger of the media measurement companies comScore and Rentrak — is forcing Nielsen to evolve.

One of the latest public criticisms was made in Jan, when Linda Yaccarino, the ad sales chief at NBCUniversal, complained that Nielsen was failing to accurately measure TV and account for all of the television group’s audiences. “Imagine you’re a quarterback, and every time you threw a touchdown, it was only worth four points instead of six,” she said in an address at the International CES trade show. The stakes are high. Some $70 billion in advertising dollars are traded in the United States each year based on Nielsen’s ratings, and hundreds of television programs live or die based on that viewership data. Chief among the complaints about Nielsen is that viewers across the country are streaming billions of hours of video on outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, but that their behavior is not being captured in industry ratings based on Nielsen data.