Why Billboard and Nielsen Are Changing the Way They Measure Popularity
You might think that, in an era when seemingly everything can be measured, charted, and tracked in real time, it would be easy to rank the popularity of different television shows.
Not so. In fact, it’s more difficult than ever. Ranking TV programs was a far simpler matter when there was one way to watch television and not all that many options. Now there are countless choices: in the shows we watch; in the devices we use to take in the shows; and whether we watch the show live, on DVR, or on YouTube.
There’s even vigorous debate about what a “television show” is. Netflix and Amazon Prime, for instance, both produce programming that certainly seems to fit that category. But these shows are streamed over the Internet — without ads, and unmeasured by the usual audience-monitoring authorities. So is Amazon’s Transparent popular? Has it been seen by more people than Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black? How does either of those stack up to, say, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory?
There’s no way for us to know. And measuring popularity is very, very difficult.
The story is similar for albums: Measuring purchases and radio play was far easier before companies had to account for streaming on services like Spotify (on a variety of devices), track-by-track downloads on iTunes and Amazon, and views of music videos on YouTube. How can a measuring service weed through all that and arrive at a definitive account of what’s most popular?
Last week, two familiar authorities announced fresh strategies for measuring media consumption in the digital age. Nielsen, famous for its TV ratings measurements, and Billboard, home of the most familiar charts in the music industry, are adjusting the way they measure viewing and listening audiences in the digital age. Call it the New Popularity.
We live in a massive-choice, fractionated-audience world that started with cable and exploded with the arrival of the Web and social media. “What’s popular” presumably means less to the contemporary entertainment seeker, who is free to follow her own taste, or pick up cues from like-minded peers, not official rankings.
For many of us, in other words, we’re still tuned in to what feels popular — arguably more than ever. Data about what’s most popular may not feel crucial, in other words.
But for the people who make and distribute entertainment, this New Popularity demands new data, and more of it. That’s why the venerable metrics that worked for decades for Nielsen and Billboard are getting a refresh: If they want to know what we’re watching and listening to, they need to focus on the new ways we’re watching and listening.
What are you watching?
The reason we’ve never had a concrete ratings-like measure of shows on Netflix or other streaming services is pretty straightforward: Netflix and other streaming services don’t reveal their numbers. The most important audience for ratings data is potential advertisers who want to know how popular a show is. Netflix and Amazon Prime shows don’t carry advertising, so why release streaming numbers?
Moreover, this opacity gives the streaming-service companies an advantage with a smaller, but rather important, audience: producers of television (or television-like) content. “Currently, the streaming sites have outsize leverage” in negotiating deals with creators, The Wall Street Journal notes, “since only they know how much a show was viewed.”
It is apparently this rarefied audience that Nielsen has in mind with its plan to work around the streamers’ silence: The measurement service will be using its “proprietary metering technology” designed to capture home viewing habits.
Nielsen’s famous “People Meter” is basically an electronic box, hooked up to a television set and responding to a special remote control, that quietly logs what’s being watched and by whom. The company has had a computer-focused variation gauging Internet use since 2010. Since the People Meter tracks consumers directly, applying it specifically to streamed shows means Nielsen doesn’t need Netflix or Amazon to cooperate. (Consumption on mobile devices, however, will apparently not be part of the mix — for now.)
Nielsen has adjusted its measurement strategies before — accounting for time-delayed viewing via DVR, for instance. And a year or so ago, I wrote about Nielsen’s introduction of a Twitter TV Ratings chart — an attempt to capture which shows we’re discussing the most on social media.
Depending on what Nielsen does with its new numbers, they may provide a useful reality check on what gatekeepers and media critic types say is popular. Even the famously skeptical public radio show “On The Media” once cited House of Cards (Netflix), and Alpha House (Amazon) as examples of the supposedly unprecedented popularity of Washington-themed shows: “These days viewers aren’t just sporadically consuming Washington fare, but bingeing.”
Are they really, though? Obviously, when it comes to those two previously unmeasured programs, that’s conjecture. And for the content-makers banking on streaming deals to build long-term, profitable audiences, it’s not good enough.
And that’s the audience Nielsen is aiming to please with its new metrics. For the rest of us, well, maybe the mere assertion that a show is popular is enough to pique our interest. People tend to like things they believe are popular — as any music-industry pro could tell you.
What do you hear?
Billboard has long produced some of the most popular charts in the world. But of course the music business has changed radically along the way. And in recent years Billboard (which actually gets its data from Nielsen Soundscan) has been challenged by various digital-focused newcomers; on any given week, the “number one song in America” varies by which data-collector you choose to consult.
Billboard hasn’t been shy about adjusting its measurements for the digital era. A couple of years ago, it added YouTube plays to its calculations on the Hot 100 and other singles charts. The effects were immediate, as for instance the YouTube sensation “Gangnam Style” ended up dominating the rap singles chart despite little if any rap-radio airplay, and a Carrie Underwood single popular on country radio was blocked from the top spot on that genre chart by a Taylor Swift song that many country stations considered too pop for their airwaves.
The underlying irony, in other words, is that the New Popularity turned out to be better news for mass-appeal artists (and their fans) than for more explicitly niche-focused artists (and their fans).
Tweaking the album chart may be even trickier. Starting with the version released Nov. 30, the Billboard 200 chart will “count 1,500 song streams from services like Spotify, Beats Music, Rdio, Rhapsody and Google Play as equivalent to an album sale,” The New York Times reported.
“For the first time, they will also count ‘track equivalent albums’ — a common industry yardstick of 10 downloads of individual tracks — as part of the formula for album rankings on the Billboard 200.” (The new count will reportedly not include plays on Pandora or YouTube.)
That sounds sort of arbitrary. But it evidently echoes the way the music industry has come to gauge album success in an era when actual albums mean a lot less than they used to. Data that Billboard shared with The Times suggested that the switch will likely benefit “big pop stars” like Ariana Grande — instead of capturing just the original spike in sales when such performers release new material, the updated formula will presumably capture weeks of bingeing on those songs over and over through streaming services.
And in the music business, demonstrating popularity seems hotter than ever these days. The Atlantic noted recently that despite the vast catalogs offered by Pandora and Spotify, the most popular station and playlist (respectively) on those services are the ones devoted to current hits. And as observed here on Yahoo Tech earlier this year, terrestrial radio has responded to the infinite-choice era by becoming more repetitive than ever.
Redefining popular
It’s obvious enough, then, why the music and television (or television-like entertainment) businesses are so eager for New Popularity data. They want the best measurements of what we’re consuming, and the way we’re consuming it, so they can make their content and their deals with the clearest possible idea of what’s popular now.
But what does it really mean to the rest of us? Occasionally I hear pining for the good old days, when a whole generation, or even a majority of the culture at large, seemed to be absorbing the same show or album at once.
Will new ways of collecting data about our entertainment habits reveal that there really are contemporary versions of “Nevermind” or All in the Family?
In a word: No. Instead, they will redefine popularity — it will be smaller than it used to be, but as big as they can make it seem. And I think that’s what most consumers actually want.
Consider the benchmark used in this New York Times column, intended to underscore the popularity of the “Serial” podcast: It “averages over 1.5 million listeners an episode. That is as many people as watch an episode of Louie, the buzzed-about comedy on FX.”
That sounds impressive! But what’s the context of that Louie number? The use of the phrase “buzzed-about” is a red flag: It’s code for “much more popular with people who write about media and entertainment than it is with the general public.”
“Serial’s” numbers are still astonishing for a podcast, and presumably that Louie figure is good enough for FX (a widely available basic cable channel). But as additional context, consider that the comedy series Selfie was summarily canceled after it “failed to make waves in the ratings, debuting to a mediocre 5.3 million viewers.”
Those details may matter to people who make cultural products for a living, but I suspect they really don’t matter that much to the rest of us. I think we still like the communal idea associated with the mass-media era — we like, in other words, popular things.
But we also like choice. And we have it. We can choose want we want to watch or listen to. And, more and more, the New Popularity lets us choose the evidence and data that supports the idea that we’re not alone.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
