Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
THE METRICS "One of the things we try to be transparent about is what is included [in our metrics], and it is TV only. And U.S. only," says Fuhrer. Nielsen measures TV viewing in more than 40,000 households. About half of these households are equipped with Nielsen's Streaming Meter which captures streaming happening on television sets. (Laptops, cell phones, and other digital devices are not measured.) Like the streaming platforms themselves, Nielsen measures minutes viewed and frequency of views, "but [the streaming platforms] don't know the people," says Fuhrer. "That's what we bring to the table. Who is watching. What their age, gender, education are. Their location, race, ethnicity." Still, Nielsen crunches numbers, and "this is where it gets complicated," Fuhrer says. "When we look at a program, we determine the average number of people viewing throughout each minute of the program. Then we multiply that by the duration of the program, and it gives us the measurement in viewing minutes. The reason we do this is because content durations vary much more on streaming services versus programs on linear television. This equalizes dissimilar durations between the various content like movies, limited series, programs with 300+ episodes, and so on. We look at minutes to say, 'Of the time people are spending on a streaming service, which programs are making up most of that time?'" Nielsen has plans to expand its scope, and new companies are entering the marketplace with different ways to analyze viewing. Then there is a company like Parrot Analytics that measures "how much time in totality audiences are engaging with a show or a movie" beyond actually watching that show or movie on its streaming platform, says Renee Engelhardt, Vice President of Partner Insights. Parrot measures what the company calls "the attention economy." While this may sound like a slick marketing term, in fact it's an important indicator of just how dramatically viewing has changed in the way that viewers interact with content. Based on the premise that time is a finite resource, and that content creators are competing for the finite time of their viewers, Parrot measures the supply (a movie or series) and the demand for it (all of the activity surrounding the supply online). This measurement of demand includes: Tracking consumer research of Content X online. This may include Google searches, reading a Wikipedia page, and the like. Views of trailers or related videos for Content X on sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion. Social media activity and engaging in conversations about Content X. Viewing episodes of Content X on open-source P2P (AKA pirated) streaming. This begs the question: Why does any of this activity matter? Parrot calls the above activity "signals," and the company applies a weight to each of the signals, based on the amount of effort it takes to express that signal. For example, "liking" a social media post requires far less effort than watching a trailer or other long-form content. The weighted signals are then aggregated to arrive at the final demand metric. This metric can be used to address numerous factors, such as determining the potential success of a show, how a show measures up in its market, and a show's staying power. "... content durations vary much more on streaming services versus programs on linear television." – brian fuhrer, nielsen svp of product strategy F E AT U R E 34 KEYFRAME