Techdirt. Stories about "nielsen" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories about "nielsen"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:57:13 PDT Nielsen Finally Realizes That TV Viewers Are Cord Cutting, Calls It 'Interesting Consumer Behavior' Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130312/09325722298/nielsen-finally-realizes-that-tv-viewers-are-cord-cutting-calls-it-interesting-consumer-behavior.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130312/09325722298/nielsen-finally-realizes-that-tv-viewers-are-cord-cutting-calls-it-interesting-consumer-behavior.shtml cord cutting (i.e., getting rid of pay TV). The industry has denied that anyone was doing this, claimed that it was just a minor blip during a recession, suggested that when kids "grew up" they'd go back to subscribing to cable, and used a variety of other means of perpetuating their denial. Instrumental in this has been Nielsen, the TV rankings people, who is closely aligned with the industry in propping up the facade. So it's pretty hilarious to watch Nielsen start to finally acknowledge that cord cutting is real, but to do so (1) so late into the game and (2) in such a condescending manner, that's clearly designed to blast out the message to TV execs (i.e., Nielsen's clients): "DON'T WORRY, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE. REALLY."
It's true. Most people watch TV in their living rooms using traditional cable or satellite options. In fact, more than 95 percent of Americans get their information and entertainment that way. But as we explored what the other 5 percent are doing, we found some interesting consumer behaviors that we want to keep an eye on.
They treat it like they've discovered a brand new species, Contentus Withoutus, and it exhibits "interesting behaviors" which "we want to keep an eye on." Interesting behaviors like... not paying $100+ per month for pay TV just so they can watch two channels? Perhaps.
This small group of video enthusiasts is tuning out traditional TV — and the trend is growing. This "Zero-TV" group, which makes up less than 5 percent of U.S. households, has bucked tradition by opting to get the information they need and want from non-traditional TV devices and services.
And there, right there, is the actual admission that those of us who have cut the cord and have no intention of going back are not a myth and are actually "growing" in numbers. Still, they describe us as having "bucked the tradition" rather than being part of a larger trend that is accelerating rapidly.

From there, the focus is on how those of us who cut the cord, still watch TV (i.e., "breathe, Mr. TV exec, they don't all just hang out on Reddit talking to each other each day").
According to Nielsen's Fourth-Quarter 2012 Cross-Platform Report, the U.S. had more than five million Zero-TV households in 2013, up from just over 2 million in 2007. These households don't fit Nielsen's traditional definition of a TV household, but they still view video content. The television itself isn't obsolete, however, as more than 75 percent of these homes still have at least one TV set, which they use to watch DVDs, play games or surf the Net. When it comes to video content, a growing amount of these households are using other devices.
All in all it's a small admission, done in a condescending way in which they pretend this is some strange abnormal behavior, which needs to be observed but shouldn't worry TV execs yet. This, by the way, is classic bad advice for those facing disruptive changing markets. "Oh, don't worry about those people who have found something better and who are dropping your service in six figure chunks each quarter. We'll just observe them and be ready to act later."

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]]> we-want-to-keep-an-eye-on-it http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130312/09325722298 Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:01:22 PDT Nielsen Sued For Billions; TV Network Claims It Manipulated Ratings Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120730/18151019885/nielsen-sued-billions-tv-network-claims-it-manipulated-ratings.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120730/18151019885/nielsen-sued-billions-tv-network-claims-it-manipulated-ratings.shtml massive legal filing, in a NY State court, India-based New Dehli Television Limited (NDTV) has sued Nielsen for billions, claiming that the famous TV ratings service manipulated ratings in India in a way that harmed its own offerings. The accusations suggest massive corruption, which NDTV tries to blame on Nielsen's investor-owners, claiming that the company's owners were trying to cut expenses, leaving the Nielsen process (which has always been somewhat suspect, relying on a relatively small number of "Nielsen households" with tracking boxes) open to manipulation. In India, which already has the reputation of a fair bit of corruption among politicians, there's the added bonus that many "politicians also own cable networks"
It is common knowledge that there are a number of television channels owned by politicians and political parties. Furthermore, politicians also own cable networks in certain Indian states. At the household level, in certain instances PeopleMeters have been installed at the residences of government officials, where tampering of the data also takes place.
It's interesting to see that Nielsen, nominally a Dutch company, is being sued by an Indian TV company... in the state of NY. Part of the reason may be that Nielsen's headquarters are in NY, but also the fact that the main investors are all based there as well.

I have no idea if the charges (and there are many, many of them) leveled at Nielsen are accurate or not, but it's somewhat amazing that we haven't seen more such charges. The lawsuit does suggest similar problems in the odd combination of "Florida, Turkey, the Philippines and across the planet." The lawsuit expands each of those charges into paragraph levels, but with no citations or backup. For example, this is how it explains Florida:
In Florida, many television broadcasters have been complaining about inaccurate ratings data resulting from inadequate sample sizes. Those television broadcasters have been unable to get alternate ratings because Nielsen has a monopoly in that market.
Seems somewhat lacking without more details. Either way, if anything, this should simply raise questions about why we use systems like Nielsen? Nielsen boxes have always been somewhat questionable, providing tremendous influence to the small number of people who have them. In a data-driven, always connected age, it would seem that there are much more effective -- and much more robust -- means of tracking what people are watching on TV.

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]]> gatekeepers http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120730/18151019885 Mon, 16 May 2011 10:49:55 PDT Did LimeWire Shutdown Increase Music Sales? Part II Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110516/00015014275/did-limewire-shutdown-increase-music-sales-part-ii.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110516/00015014275/did-limewire-shutdown-increase-music-sales-part-ii.shtml massive drop following the shuttering of LimeWire. Of course, I pointed out at the time that those celebrating this were (yet again) focused on the wrong question. So often we hear copyright maximalists talk about how "piracy" must be stopped, but they never seem to want to discuss whether or not that will make people buy again. So, we looked at some of the data provided by some who did believe LimeWire's shutdown had increased sales, but it came up a bit wanting. Still, I'm all about data, and if there really is data supporting the claims that LimeWire's shutdown resulted in increased sales, it might make me reconsider my position on the wisdom of taking legal action against operations like LimeWire.

So, with the recent settlement in hand, it seemed like as good a time as any to look into the data. Of course, it also helped that Capitalist Lion Tamer sent over the latest stats from Nielsen, noting that music sales are up in 2011.

Boom! Case closed. LimeWire's shutdown saved the music industry. Right? Well, actually, no. Doesn't look like that at all. In fact, Nielsen doesn't even mention LimeWire's shutdown in its note about this, attributing much of the increase to the Beatles finally coming to iTunes. And, actually, if you look at the same Nielsen reports going all the way back to 2006, they show music sales going up each year. It's just that more of it is single tracks, rather than full overpriced albums. It looks like the same is true of the latest data as well. If anything, the data suggests a noticeable slowdown in the growth rate. That is, sales are only up 1.6%, this year, which seems significantly down from the growth rate in past years. In 2006, the growth rate was 19%. In 2007 it was 14%. In 2008 it was 10%. In 2009 it was 2.1%.

Perhaps there's some other data to be found, but it's hard to see how there's much of an argument that the shutdown of LimeWire, even if it really did cause file sharing to drop massively, then resulted in an increase in music sales. Kinda makes you wonder about those claims from the RIAA about just how much LimeWire had to do with their problems.... It also explains why the labels were happy to settle for $105 million after claiming trillions in damages from LimeWire. Even the industry seems to know that it's not file sharing that's the real issue.

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]]> checking-in http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110516/00015014275 Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:14:00 PDT Nielsen Sues Comscore With Patent It Once Was Sued For Infringing Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110323/04095313599/nielsen-sues-comscore-with-patent-it-once-was-sued-infringing.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110323/04095313599/nielsen-sues-comscore-with-patent-it-once-was-sued-infringing.shtml "5675510") for the invention of a "computer use meter and analyzer," has now sued competitor Comscore over the same patent, which it eventually came into possession of after settling the lawsuit by buying the patent from Jupiter Media Metrix. Once again, however, this seems to demonstrate the pointlessness of the patent system. Metering and analyzing internet traffic is something that came about because everyone needed it and lots of people tried to tackle the problem. No one went into that space because there was the availability of a patent. People got into the space because there was a need and a market. And, now, Nielsen seems to want to beat the competition not through competing with better products, but by suing over a questionable patent.

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]]> destructive-force-of-patents http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110323/04095313599 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:01:00 PST Finding The Long Tail In Music Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100124/1752357883.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100124/1752357883.shtml required massive backing to become successful. It was the golden lottery ticket story of musical stardom.

Last week, we wrote a post about an interview with Tommy Boy Entertainment boss, Tom Silverman, claiming that just 14 unsigned artists "broke the obscurity line," -- which was defined as sales of 10,000 albums. Amusingly, three days after this post, I met Silverman on an airplane over the Atlantic... and only realized it was him when he started talking to the guy seated next to me about my post not realizing who I was (small freaking world). We had a brief, but quite enjoyable conversation, and while I see his point, I'm still not convinced his conclusion is correct on the issue of breaking artists (his view of business models, however, seems right on). Meanwhile, in the comments to our post, Peter Wells from TuneCore disputed Tom's numbers. Since then, both have expanded on the discussion.

Tom provided more details on the number of totally independent success stories (decreasing the sum from 14 to 12 due to the fact that they had mischategorized 2 of the bands) over at the MusicianCoaching.com site. He then went on to claim that the long tail doesn't seem to be working for the music business:
Clearly the ease of making and distributing music does not benefit "breaking" music. Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both. I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history. Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it. I know this is a bold statement but it is true.
Certainly bold words, though they did not address my original criticism with the point -- which is that number of albums sold is a poor measure of "obscurity" (or non-obscurity, as the case may be). As I said then: "You don't have to sell albums to become well known, and just because you're well known, it doesn't mean you sell albums. It's not the best proxy for figuring this stuff out." This week, at Midem, musician Hal Ritson of The Young Punx put it much more succinctly: "Sales are not how you measure success any more. You figure out how to get as many people as possible to hear your music, and then you figure out if you're profitable." Also, I still think it's wrong to only count totally independent artists in this list, because many artists signed to labels (both indie and majors) may use new technology to help breakout (with or without massive support from their labels).

Either way, even beyond that, it looks like Silverman's numbers may be suspect. Peter Wells Jeff Price (from Tunecore) followed up Peter Wells' comment on our site with a super detailed post about the problems with Silverman's numbers -- which rely on Nielsen SoundScan data, which Wells Price notes is massively incomplete. He quickly names multiple artists who sold hundreds of thousands of tracks, which aren't measured by SoundScan, and suggests the real issue isn't that new artists can't break, but that the measuring system doesn't take into account how they break these days.

I have to say that Wells' Price's post is quite convincing. It's incredibly well-detailed and provides multiple examples of clearly successful (and hardly obscure) artists that aren't counted by Silverman's method. I still think that the points raised by Silverman about new business models in his original interview were dead on (and even he made the point that sometimes it made sense to release albums totally for free and use other ways of getting money -- which under his own definition would have made them impossible to "break out."). But it seems like there's an awful lot of evidence that our original assertion is still true: there are plenty of artists that are, in fact, breaking out thanks to new technologies -- and many are able to do so without a label. Whether or not it's "harder" to break out today due to increased competition may be another issue, but I'm not yet convinced this is a real problem.

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]]> it's-out-there http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100124/1752357883 Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:37:25 PDT On Second Thought, SoundScan Claims Mos Def T-Shirt Doesn't Count As An Album Sale Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090622/0154265313.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090622/0154265313.shtml selling an album via a t-shirt (whereby if you bought the t-shirt, you got to download the album) was a pretty cool idea. What seemed even cooler was the claim that Nielsen Soundscan would count each t-shirt sale as an album sale. However, Soundscan has come out claiming this simply is not true:
"Nielsen Soundscan knows nothing about this and without knowing more, we have no intention of counting units triggered by the sale of a t-shirt."
The company offering up the t-shirts tried to explain, saying:
Instead of directly reporting retail sales through his company, Invisible DJ, Wineberg plans to relay the information back to the label. The label, in turn, can then submit the sale to Soundscan.
Hmm. That's not quite the same thing as saying Soundscan will count the t-shirt sales? And, it may be even worse, as Soundscan said it may count those sales submitted by the label, but only after "a discussion and negotiation." In other words, there's no real deal here at all, and nothing to suggest that the t-shirts will be counted as album sales.

Of course, that's ridiculous. In this era when the "music" is getting people to buy other stuff, the specific number of "album" sales is meaningless. We've seen artists who embrace these unique models making a lot more money from them, but they don't appear as top sellers because Soundscan only wants to count one (increasingly smaller) part of the ecosystem? That sort of thinking reinforces the misguided focus on the "album."

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]]> that's-pretty-silly http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090622/0154265313 Mon, 2 Feb 2009 12:33:00 PST Companies Disabling 'Reply-All' Button, Rather Than Dealing With Inane Email Threads Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090202/0147123599.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090202/0147123599.shtml punish employees who misused the "reply-all" button on their email clients. That, by itself, seemed a bit extreme, but Jeremy Wagstaff alerts us to the fact that some organizations are going a step further and figuring out ways to disable the reply-all button entirely. The latest to do so is Nielsen, which did so with a cheery memo to staff explaining why this would "reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space." That's one way to think about it.

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]]> one-way-to-deal-with-the-problem http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090202/0147123599 Wed, 5 Dec 2007 14:56:55 PST Nielsen Decides It Can Become A Copyright Cop Too Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071205/101149.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071205/101149.shtml clueless to understand why DRM will never work. The latest is that companies are rushing to be the latest vendors to supply the entertainment industry with watermarking or filtering software to try to "stop" piracy. First there was the company Audible Magic, who the entertainment industry described as its magic bullet in stopping piracy. While some have pointed out that Audible Magic doesn't work particularly well, it has become something of the standard for companies to implement. In fact, it was something of a surprise earlier this year when Google decided to build its own filtering solution, rather than just use Audible Magic.

However, with so much demand for Audible Magic's non-working solution, you knew others had to jump in -- and some of them would be big players. The big media monitoring firm Nielsen is now entering the space with a big announcement, suggesting that its knowledge and connections within the television world will help it dominate the market. Of course, there doesn't seem to be much discussion on how Nielsen's solution is likely to be just as useless as Audible Magic's or anyone else's in trying to "stop" unauthorized copies from getting online. Of course, the entertainment companies remain too clueless to realize that all of these vendors are simply robbing them blind, promising them a magic elixir that can never work and only distracts the companies from what they should be doing: adapting to the changing market with new business models. In the article about Nielsen's announcement, NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, declares that Nielsen's entrance is a game changer: "The point is the big boys are coming, and that signals that this is a field that has reached technological maturity. It will achieve widespread commercial adoption, and from a content point of view, it will contribute dramatically to reducing the easy theft of copyrighted material online."

We'll record that here and check back in the future to see how accurate he is. I have no doubt that these technologies will achieve widespread commercial adoption -- but only because folks like Cotton actually believe that it will "dramatically" reduce infringement (which he incorrectly calls "theft"). Of course, Cotton is no stranger to outlandish and dramatic statements. He's the same guy who claimed that the cops were spending too much money on things like burglary and bank-robbing when they should be focused on important things like copyright infringement. He's also responsible for the totally ridiculous claim that movie piracy was hurting corn farmers. So, I'd take anything he says with a rather large grain of salt.

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]]> media-monitoring-or-media-blocking? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20071205/101149 Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:45:18 PDT New Website Measurement System Just A Little Less Useless Than Previous One Joseph Weisenthal http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070710/054555.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070710/054555.shtml no longer use page views as its primary metric for measuring the popularity of websites. Instead, it will focus on the amount of time that users spend on the site. Obviously, there have been a lot of problems with the current system, as the use of page views grossly inflates the popularity of some sites, like MySpace, while penalizing sites that aren't refreshed or reloaded as often. As the above article notes, the new system will give YouTube a boost, but will ding Google's main site, which isn't designed to keep users around. Of course, therein lies the flaw with this new measurement system. Google is incredibly profitable and successful, precisely because it does a good job of whisking users away to other sites, either through ads or its search results. The idea of penalizing it because users don't spend a lot of time on the site is absurd. When it comes to TV shows, it may make sense to adopt a uniform measurement system, because all TV shows have the same purpose: to sell ads. Websites, however, have a variety of different business models, so trying to define a standard metric of success is going to prove impossible. Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a site or service is its profitability, which, unlike page views or time spent, isn't so easily gamed.

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]]> keeping-score http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20070710/054555