Nielsen announced Tuesday that the company would begin tracking streaming video content on Facebook, Hulu and YouTube in what could be a boon for sports providers struggling with the cord-cutting trend. Facebook has already entered into deals to stream Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer while Hulu has touted a new “sports-centric” television package and YouTube is also launching a bundle brimming with sports channels.
ESPN has reportedly lost nearly 3 million broadcast subscribers in a year, but its channels will be featured in both the Hulu and YouTube packages. The new tracking program stands to benefit networks like ESPN and its peer cable sports providers.
“It’s a positive for everybody,” John Fortunato, a Fordham communications professor who specializes in sports media, told SportTechie. “For the leagues and the content providers, it’s going to give them more accurate, larger numbers indicating who’s watching sports content. For the advertisers, it’s more beneficial because they’re going to get more accurate data.”
It’s a reflection of the times that such data would become part of Nielsen’s reports. The streaming data will be included in digital content reports with the capacity to capture incremental viewing. This news comes three weeks after Nielsen said it would include the Hulu and YouTube TV numbers with more traditional live broadcast, DVR and On Demand ratings.
Fortunato said sports ratings have always been underreported, owing to the communal nature of viewing in bars, restaurants, dorm rooms and other group settings.
“If they can show you what their TV number is and then add in all these digital platforms, it only makes it more robust from the team and league standpoint,” he said. “Advertisers just want to be where the audience is.”
He noted that, for major sporting events, digital content will be a particularly small “additive” as fans will opt to watch the Super Bowl on their big-screen TV rather than their mobile device. The Yankees fan wanting to stream a summer day game while lounging in Central Park benefits more. As such, the real value of this new tracking data will be for sports with lengthier regular seasons — especially baseball, but also basketball and hockey.
A summer study conducted by Nielsen for the SportsBusiness Journal illustrated the scope of the aging sports TV viewer, with 23 of 24 sports seeing their median viewer grow older in the last decade. (The one exception, women’s tennis, has seen a three-year decline in median age but only down to 55.) The demographic of MLB viewers via Nielsen’s classic ratings has a median age of 57, yet its popular MLB At Bat app — which had 8.4 billion minutes of consumption back in 2015 — had a mean user age of 30 that year.
While MLB At Bat steaming won’t be included in this particular Nielsen update, that discrepancy is emblematic of the changing market. Similarly, Twitter and Amazon, which are also not part of the Nielsen announcement, have been the carriers for Thursday night NFL games last year and this fall while Twitter is also streaming MLB games.
“Those audiences are only going to increase [with streaming],” Fortunato said. “Right now, there’s still obviously relatively small in comparison to broadcast, but you can see a generational shift.”
As Megan Clarken, Nielsen’s president of product leadership said in a statement announcing the news, “Through capturing this audience, Nielsen is providing publishers, agencies and advertisers with a better picture of today’s media consumption, with comparable metrics.”
Nielsen and ESPN have reportedly feuded over estimates of just how many subscribers the sports network has lost, but an ESPN executive praised the inclusion of Hulu and YouTube TV numbers in ratings.
“This move represents an important step forward toward complete cross-platform measurement, and we are encouraged by Nielsen’s efforts to capture viewing across the shifting media ecosystem — particularly among the growing number of partnerships between programmers and digital distributors,” Wanda Young, ESPN’s senior vice president of marketing and consumer engagement, said in a statement.
