Nielsen’s Gauge Is All About The Others, Cable News Is The New Twitter

Nielsen’s Gauge Is All About The Others

Remember last year when there were a spate of headlines in the mainstream press about how Nielsen’s The Gauge report revealed that streaming was “beating out” cable and broadcast?

The reality was that streaming was beating out cable and broadcast individually, but it was not even close to beating out cable and broadcast combined. 

Which is notable in that for most people under 60, the distinction between cable and broadcast is negligible—it’s all just “TV.” 

Fast forward a year and the same thing is happening again. It seems that the combined number for cable and broadcast viewing dipped below 50 percent last month. Leading to a new spate of headlines about how streaming is winning because Old School TV now constitutes “less than half” of all TV viewing.

What those headlines leave out is that The Gauge does not just have three categories. 

It has four. 

So while the duo of Broadcast and Cable has indeed dropped to 49.6 percent, Streaming is still only at 38.7 percent.

The remaining 11.6 percent? That’s a category called “Other” and you will have to keep on reading to find out what’s inside it.

Why It Matters

According to Nielsen:

Within The Gauge, “other” includes all other TV usage that does not fall into the Broadcast, Cable or Streaming categories. This primarily includes all other tuning (unmeasured sources), unmeasured video on demand (VOD), streaming through a cable set top box, audio streaming, gaming and other device (DVD playback) use. Because streaming via cable set top boxes does not credit respective streaming distributors, these are included in the “other” category. Crediting individual streaming distributors from cable set top boxes is something Nielsen continues to pursue as we enhance our Streaming Meter technology.

Now if you’re thinking that most of that (listening to Spotify, playing Madden 23) does not sound like something you’d refer to as “TV,” you would not be wrong. 

I mean I get that Nielsen wants to measure everything that is “on the glass” but given that many of us use our TVs, which are often attached to both the internet and a really kick ass sound system, for other purposes, that may not be, you know, the best idea.

What happens is you get publications like the normally astute Wall Street Journal putting out articles with blurbs that read “Last month, Americans spent less time watching traditional TV than they did streaming services and other platforms, according to Nielsen data.”

Technically it is correct—it does say “and other platforms” but I don’t think I am going too far out on a limb when I say that most people will read that and assume that “other platforms” refers to other streaming platforms. Not Madden and Spotify. 

There are multiple other misunderstandings around The Gauge’s measurement. 

There is, as Evan Shapiro points out, a tendency to call Old School Pay TV, e.g. broadcast and cable, “linear”, which ignores the fact that much of what is watched on streaming FAST channels is also technically "linear."

There’s the fact that vMVPDs, whose signals are delivered via streaming, not cable or satellite, are included in the “linear” category, a move that Shapiro also questions.

For my money, however, the biggest question is what The Gauge is actually measuring.

Is it how many people are watching CBS or Netflix? 

If that is the goal, then by all means include viewing on Hulu Live TV in CBS’s numbers, and Comcast set top box viewing in Netflix’s.

Is it how many people are watching something on their TV that is delivered via a streaming connection and how many are watching via cable, satellite or even antenna? That’s a very different number.

The problem, of course, is all about nomenclature.

“Streaming” refers to both a technology (delivery of television programming via the open internet) and a type of content platform (Netflix, Pluto TV, Hulu et al)

Similarly, “linear” refers to both a type of content delivery (content is available via a pre-programmed schedule) and to traditional pay TV, aka “cable TV”, which mostly consist of pre-programmed networks, but also has a goodly amount of on demand programming.

This leads to all sorts of confusion around what is actually being measured. Not just in The Gauge, but in dozens of other studies and reports that manage to make their way into the headlines.

It matters for several interrelated reasons.

• There is an inordinate amount of specious “research” in and around the television industry: 

• Projections pulled out of thin air and gussied up with some extra decimal points to look more impressive. (“eAcme Corp projects that subscription streaming revenue will rise 2.184% in 2024.”) 

• Poorly done “surveys” that draw clickbait style conclusions. 

• These numbers are then picked up by both the trade press and the mainstream press, one citing the other until you need to perform a forensics study to actually find the original source.

• Companies then rely on these bogus numbers to make business decisions.

We tracked how this works back in January 2019 when a report making the absurd claim that 60 percent of US households had already cut the cord made its way through the media ecosystem, getting picked up by several well known trade publications and numerous mainstream sites. After facing strong backlash on social media, several of the trade sites subsequently pulled the article. Yet a quick Google search reveals that the misinformation still lives on numerous reputable sounding sites like TalkCMO, TV Technology and RapidTV News. 

The proliferation of all this incorrect data is made exponentially more problematic by the growth of generative AI, which scrapes the web for data and is attracted to data cited by multiple sources.

So there’s that, and it’s a problem.

To wit, there is an argument to be made that one of the reasons so many of the TV networks dashed willy-nilly into streaming was that the steady drumbeat of “cable TV is dead!!” articles, based on these sorts of speculative stats, led them to forget that a majority of US households still do subscribe to pay TV and that they, in fact, made tens of billions of dollars from those tens of millions of households.

Though you’d think they’d be a little smarter than that.

Oh well.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are in this industry, you need to put on your Critical Thinking Cap every time you read about a report or a study.

You need to ask some basic questions beginning with nomenclature: how are you defining this term? What are you including in it?

I will guarantee you that in most cases, their definition does not match yours.

If you are an editor or journalist, remember to apply equal degrees of common sense and skepticism to these stats, paying special attention to definitions, research methodology and the basis for detailed projections. Meaning that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is not true and so don’t rush the article out just to get clicks. 

Cable News Is The New Twitter

There were a number of cable news shake-ups this week. CNN shuffled around its anchor line-up so that Abby Phillip and Manu Raju were promoted to anchor slots and Chris Wallace and Christiane Amanpour got their own shows. 

Meanwhile CBS News witnessed a shake-up at the top, with president Neeraj Khemlani unexpectedly resigning over the weekend, to be replaced by longtime correspondent Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews. 

This is the third shake-up at a major TV news network this year—CNN’s Chris Licht was let go in light of a damning article in The Atlantic, and NBC’s Noah Oppenheim left their news operation as well. And while the fired Tucker Carlson was not president of Fox, he was their best-known anchor, bringing the total to four.

The shake-ups got ample coverage in the press because well, nobody likes some good media gossip as much as the media.

That said, it’s worth wondering why these networks, whose already low ratings continue to shrink, wind up consuming so much headspace.

One reason might be their synergistic relationship with print journalists, a relationship that’s only deepened as the App Formerly Known As Twitter continues to self-destruct.

Allow me to explain.

Why It Matters

Consider, if you will, how many fairly well known print journalists also have the title of “special correspondent” or similar at one of the cable or network TV news networks. 

At one level it almost seems like a conflict of interest—whose POV are they putting out there—their newspaper’s? Their own? The cable network’s?

Then there’s the echo chamber effect: I report on this story in the New York Times, then I appear on CNN to talk about it further and then other people write about it and I then write and talk about their responses. And so on and so on.

That’s looking at it from the audience perspective.

From the journalist’s perspective, it’s an amazing way to promote themselves, reach a broader audience (or at least a different audience—hitting the million or so people who watch cable news is not the same as hitting the almost 10 million people who subscribe to the Times.) It’s also a way to no longer be an anonymous byline on a page.

Which would seem to be the real benefit: appearing on cable news networks is a great way to build a brand for yourself, especially now that Twitter, er, X, seems to be a much less desirable option.

For years, Twitter provided journalists with a way to build an audience, sharing their often snarky thoughts, while proving out their grasp of various new stories.

While that’s a very different skill set than the ones required for cable news—there’s no need to be well dressed and attractive on Twitter, the need to build a reputation in an unstable industry is a constant and so print journalists have a vested interest in the success of cable and network news.

The result is the echo chamber effect: print journalists report on what’s being said on TV because it is often their friends and peers who are saying it.

Plus there’s the money thing: TV journalists make a lot more money than print journalists. At least for now, anyway. 

Yet another reason to pay attention to national TV news.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re a journalist and you can get a gig appearing on CNN or MSNBC, then more power to you. Journalism is not a very high-paying profession and if you can get a TV network to actually pay you, then good for you

If you are one of the cable or network news organizations, one word: website.

The way people get their information has changed. (Fifteen or twenty years ago, but still, it’s changed.)

Yet your websites are largely in denial of that shift, functioning mostly as a way to get people to turn on the TV set and they look like they were last updated sometime during the early 00s.

What if you went the opposite way and created a news website that had some video but mostly focused on text and quick hit summaries (think Axios) saving video for the types of stories that would benefit from a more visual telling.

It might just win you a whole new audience. Not to mention a new vehicle to pitch to advertisers, who are getting wise to the limitations of packing ads into short form videos.

Something to think about.