衡量电视和网络的指标大相径庭
全球总裁 Steve Hasker
当我们回顾 2015 年的前期和新媒体季时，不乏行业观察家愿意就广告商应如何在传统电视和新数字平台上分配投资发表看法。
Key to these significant investment decisions is understanding where and to what extent audiences are watching TV and digital video. Unfortunately, the metrics commonly used to compare TV and digital viewing are vastly different and often misunderstood. This results in reports, in publications ranging from The Verge to The New York Times, that digital video programming has a greater audience than a TV program because the total digital views are greater than the number of TV viewers, based on ratings reported by Nielsen.
In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience — how many viewers there are in an average minute of content. In the digital space, on the other hand, video measurement is commonly expressed as the gross number of times the video is viewed, even if only for one minute or one second. These two metrics are quite different, and comparing one to the other unfairly tilts the comparison against TV.
我们正在通过我们的 "全受众 "测量解决方案来应对这一行业挑战，该解决方案将在电视和数字领域提供基于 "同类 "指标的收视率。尼尔森将在今年年底前完成 "全受众 "测量的大部分工作。
Let’s consider two examples: ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and the 2014 World Cup shown on ESPN.
In May 2015, “Jimmy Kimmel Live” had an average audience of 2.2 million adults. The 23 “featured” videos on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” YouTube channel averaged about 9 million views, and very popular ones got more than 25 million views. These numbers appear to show that the YouTube audience is much larger than the TV audience.
However, the total TV audience as we measure it is not actually 2.2 million – that’s just the audience that tuned in during any given minute of the program. The average May telecast attracted 5.3 million adults, meaning that in the average week, the program was watched by 16.6 million adults; and over the month, the reach of the program was 43.1 million adults. Nearly one out of five American adults tuned into the program for that one month, and that’s the total TV audience of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
In every assessment of TV and digital audiences, we need to use comparable metrics — but we can’t compare YouTube views to the TV average-minute audience.
In our second example, the 2014 World Cup on ESPN had an average-minute TV audience of 4.6 million persons, and received 115.5 million digital views. But 4.6 million for TV and 115.5 million for digital is the wrong comparison — if we translate digital viewership into a TV metric, the average-minute digital audience of the World Cup on ESPN was 307,000, representing just 7% lift of the TV audience.
数字收视应尽快纳入视频测量，因为毫无疑问，数字收视正在不断增长，并已成为日常视频消费的一部分。这需要尼尔森与我们的客户继续合作，也需要出版商和广告商共同决定将数字收视纳入收视率。就我们而言，当我们提及电视观众时，我们将明确说明我们使用的是平均分钟指标。
电视网络和纯数字视频出版商在与广告商洽谈时都需要进行公平的比较。在此基础上，我们需要对非传统视频渠道进行独立的第三方测量，这种测量与我们为电视提供的测量具有可比性。
As we roll out the pieces of Total Audience measurement, buyers and sellers will need to weigh in and help finalize their definitions to determine which metrics to trade on. In the meantime, buyers and sellers should beware.
This article originally appeared on adage.com.
