A Nielsen change benefiting Amazon has prompted a groundswell of public opposition from the other NFL broadcasters.
Nielsen announced earlier this month that it will begin incorporating Amazon’s first-party data into its viewership estimates for Thursday Night Football, marking the first time that the measurement company has incorporated data from one of its clients. Throughout last season, Amazon released its internal viewership estimates alongside Nielsen’s third-party numbers, with its internal average (11.3M) eighteen percent higher than that of Nielsen (9.6M).
Per The Wall Street Journal, both Amazon and the NFL lobbied Nielsen to make the change, which is being vehemently opposed by the other networks.
CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus became the latest and most prominent critic of Nielsen’s move during a Tuesday CBS conference call to preview the NFL season. When asked by this writer about the arrangement, he said that “[a]nything that is not impartial and unbiased is unacceptable” and added that it is “extremely odd and unfortunate that different rules are suddenly applying to one platform.”
Previously, researchers Flora Kelly of ESPN and Michael Mulvihill of Fox Sports publicly expressed their disagreement. Kelly noted to Sports Business Journal that incorporating Amazon’s first party data would make it difficult to distinguish between actual viewer behavior and changes in methodology, resulting in “questionable” comparisons.
There is plenty of recent precedent for a Nielsen methodological change altering viewership comparisons — the addition of out-of-home viewing three years ago — but that change has affected all networks equally. Beyond the fact that only Amazon would benefit from the change in the short term, a concern is that Amazon’s internal figures show viewer behavior that is out of step with Nielsen estimates, specifically greater co-viewing and out-of-home viewing, per WSJ.
Last week, Sean Cunningham of the Video Advertising Bureau — an industry group that represents the networks and has been highly critical of Nielsen in recent years — told the Wall Street Journal that Nielsen was setting “an incredibly dangerous precedent” and questioned why one should believe that “there are exponentially more people watching Amazon football in households and out of homes than the other four networks.”
The VAB was expected to lodge a formal objection to the move on Tuesday, per Sports Business Journal, ahead of a decision by the Media Rating Council on Wednesday whether to approve the arrangement. Per SBJ, the MRC is expected to “rubber stamp” the plan.
Viewership increased nearly 60 percent for Amazon’s NFL preseason game last week, though that would have nothing to do with this yet-to-be-approved plan.
(News from CBS conference call, Richard Deitsch 8.29, WSJ 8.23, SBJ 8.28)
