According to a piece aired this morning on NPR, (listen or read here,) Nielsen tracks TV viewership in many many ways, but has difficulty tracking other ways people watch their favorite shows:
Nielsen tracks online viewers, but it does not aggregate that data with its regular TV ratings. Some Internet video sites, like Hulu, charge that Nielsen is vastly undercounting their viewers, as well.
Kate Sirkin, who directs global research at the media planning and buying firm Starcom MediaVest Group, says advertisers are starting to demand more comprehensive tracking of viewers across platforms.
“I’m not sure if that metric is the only metric we need going forward,” she says of traditional Nielsen television ratings. “We would love cross-media measurements.”
Sirkin says she would like measurements that aggregate regular TV and online ratings. She suggests Nielsen may be falling behind right at the moment when the ways people watch television are multiplying.
Soon, Nielsen promises, it will be able to deliver more measurements. Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of media products, says Nielsen is laboring to get new measurements in place that will combine data about how people watch on regular TV sets, computers and even on smart phones and other mobile devices.
“We’ll be able to tell what type of video they watch, what type of sites they go to, how they interact on those sites, what they buy on those sites, what types of news articles they’re reading,” Hasker says.
But the company is starting just by combing TV and online video. It will be years before the company is able to do what Hasker envisions.
When this happens, will photographers be able to license their work for higher usage rates based on how long a viewer spends reading a particular article online or how popular a mobile download is? Will reps have more bargaining power if reps/photographers have access to this information? If a TV show is more popular, advertising rates are higher because more “eyeballs” are delivered to the company placing the advertisement. Shouldn’t a photographer be paid more if there are more “clicks?” More views on an iPad? More pictures downloaded to an iPhone?
