Once upon a time, the Nielsen Ratings were the alpha and omega of TV viewership ratings. For decades, the marketing firm had the most reliable methodology for figuring out how many people were watching things across the country. The networks all turned to the Nielsen ratings to figure out which shows were popular, which ones deserved renewal, and so on. (Which in turn helped inform advertising firms on when and where to target their commercials, and so on.)
But a few things have changed since the 1960s, and even more so in the last decade, and the last few years. In 2022, Nielsen was sold to a private equity firm and stripped for parts—a move that came after years of struggling to create a reliable ratings system for the rapid rise in streaming content. As explained in a recent article in The New York Times:
Over the past two years, as nearly every major streaming service has introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.
Netflix discloses what it calls "hours viewed" and "views" for its shows. Prime Video, as well as Max, prefer to describe how many million "viewers" watched a hit of their choosing.
The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.
This confuddlement of metrics is compounded by the fact that many of these big streaming companies want to deliberately obscure and control their data in order to attract investors. Will Tavlin expanded on this in a recent N+1 article about the visual homogenization—the Netflixization, if you will—of direct-to-streaming movies:
Tudum described The Old Guard as a "blockbuster" that was "already among the top 10 most popular Netflix films ever," and "on track to reach 72M households in its first 4 weeks!"
Reaching seventy-two million households didn't mean what it sounded like it meant. What it actually meant was that seventy-two million accounts watched at least two minutes of The Old Guard. According to Netflix, two minutes was "long enough to indicate the choice was intentional," even though Netflix designed its viewing experience to be totally unintentional. An essential part of Netflix's platform is its autoplay feature, which launches users into the next episode of a television series, or an algorithmically chosen movie, seconds after a program ends and sometimes just before the credits roll.
As Tavlin illustrates, this obfuscation of data means that streaming services such as Netflix don't even have any incentive to create quality films; most movies get bumped down the recommendation list shortly after their release anyway, disappearing into the endless maw of the algorithm. What Netflix can do instead is create the illusion of quality—based on superficial data like, say, people want to Adam Sandler in a romcom set in Paris—and then inflate the numbers based on how many people watch the first two minutes, intentionally or not.
In short: no one actually knows who the hell is watching anything anymore. All we know is that there is a lot of content out there, and there are certainly a lot of people watching something. But that doesn't mean any of it is meaningful, or memorable, let alone good.
That's not to say that the Nielsen Ratings represented some rose-colored ideal of the past, either. But at least between that, and tangible box office returns, there was some clear metric to work towards.
Casual Viewing [Will Tavlin / N+1]
Who's Watching What on TV? Who's to Say? [John Koblin / The New York Times]
Disclosure: I also write for Wirecutter, which is part of the New York Times Company, which also publishes The New York Times
