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NIELSEN'S PLAN TO MEASURE ONLINE AUDIO

Posted by Robert Bartosh
April 7, 2014 - 11:41am UTC

NIELSEN'S PLAN TO MEASURE ONLINE AUDIO

4-7-14

Online measurement has become one of the biggest issues facing radio in a long time. Broadcasters believe if they can provide advertisers 

with accurate online listening numbers, combined with their over-the-air numbers, more revenue will flow to radio. Last week, when Radio Ink interviewed Premiere's syndicated talker Sean Hannity for an upcoming cover story, Hannity said he believed he had millions of listeners he was not getting credit for that were listening online using a device not being captured by Nielsen in any way. If true, not only in Hannity's case, but across the industry, it's undoubtedly costing radio revenue. 

When Nielsen purchased Arbitron, hopes were high that the additional resources the larger company brought to the table would also mean an online plus over-the-air measurement system. And, it does. Farshad Family (pictured) is senior vice president, local media product leadership at Nielsen. He leads product strategy for Nielsen’s local media business in the U.S., including local television and audio audience measurement. Family is on the cover of the latest issue of Radio Ink which is out today (and can be picked up in the magazine bins at he NAB show in Vegas). Here's a preview from the Family interview, about how Nielsen plans to measure online radio.

We would not rely on samples for the digital listening. We would be collecting it on a census basis — a census approach is different than the traditional approach. We feel strongly that measuring consumption at the point at which it happens, and the idea of putting our SDK into the various players or apps that our clients have, is different from taking the approach where you rely on server logs from back-end systems. We know it’s important to be able to link a reliable demographic to that listener.

There, we want to leverage existing Nielsen infrastructure where the digital measurement that we provided with video space — infrastructure that leverages technology called OCR, online campaign ratings. That is a product we have in the digital space and video space that’s already used to measure digital media consumption. It gets demographics from our data partners. We are able to tie demographics to audio consumption that we pick up through our meter and then are able to report that in a format that the industry is able to use.

Family did not give a solid timetable for when this new service would be in place or what any of the cost might be to stations.

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