Nielsen Aims to Level Playing Field With New Netflix Ratings
The curtain is lifting on Netflix's mysterious viewership data, so says Nielsen Media. The godfather of TV ratings recently launched SVOD measurement in earnest and plans to go out with viewership statistics on big-swing originals Mindhunter and Stranger Things 2 in the coming weeks as it courts additional clients to the new service.
Among those stats floating around are for House of Cards. Now set to end with its sixth season, the show had 4.6 million viewers for its May premiere by standards comparable with the live-plus-7 ratings window, according to Nielsen. Eight media companies, including Disney-ABC, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros., already are paying for those numbers — which, like traditional Nielsen measurements, come from audio codes within programming.
Agreements with Nielsen currently forbid it from going public with the data, but it's considered an inevitability. Ramifications could extend beyond the end of one of Hollywood's biggest mysteries. Originals' ratings data might influence talent contracts, and information on acquired series are expected to impact library deals for studios.
What's missing? Mobile, for one. That can account for as much as a third of viewing, and Nielsen's SVOD is only capturing its current sample's streaming habits on TV sets.
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