This ranking methodology heavily favours older viewers. If you looked at all ages on all screens, the data would be a lot different. Many children and young adults would be watching on laptops, tablets or smartphones..... not TV sets. 

RadioAaron wrote:

torontostan wrote:

Many children and young adults would be watching on laptops, tablets or smartphones..... not TV sets. 

You can up that to this middle-aged household.

Well, Nielsen is likely the largest and best known rating service in the US, if the rating is flawed why don't they fix it?  Looks like many shows in the top ten would appeal to children or younger adults, regardless if they are watching on TV, smartphones or laptops.  

Also some have mentioned that Numeris and Arbitron don't reflect the listenership of ethnic groups properly in their radio surveys.  If true then why has this not been fixed?  This is the business they chose to be in, so it is on them to solve these issues.  

I would think that the streamers, who are losing billions and investing in original productions would want accurate surveys.  If established streamers like Netflix, Disney, Prime, Apple etc are paying for this service they should expect that the survey better reflects who actually is watching, and on what platform.
 
Every problem costs money to fix.  Again this is the business that Nielsen and others chose to be in, if flawed then fix it.

Odd how this top ten list is supposedly skewed older...the same audience that broadcasters, advertisers and agencies say they are not that interested in. 

Maybe Numeris could try if they focused on sampling the largest 2 or 3 ethnic groups proportionately. 

paterson1 wrote:

I would think that the streamers, who are losing billions and investing in original productions would want accurate surveys.  

They already have way more accurate data than Nielson can provide. 

Another core difference between Nielson and Numeris is that Numeris is owned by the broadcasters themselves, so only those who want to be measured are.

This list wouldn't really be used by anyone except to cross-compare services as a whole. Really it just shows how dependant a service like AppleTV is on a show like Ted Lasso, etc. The streamers have way more data about their own viewership than Neilson could ever provide them.

torontostan wrote:

This list wouldn't really be used by anyone except to cross-compare services as a whole. Really it just shows how dependant a service like AppleTV is on a show like Ted Lasso, etc. The streamers have way more data about their own viewership than Neilson could ever provide them.

It is interesting as well that Nielsen says that Ted Lasso was the most streamed original program last year. Lasso was on Apple TV which has far fewer subscribers than Netflix, Disney+ Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+. 

This story and the information does have some legs since it has been picked up by Yahoo, NY Times, The Guardian, Men's Health in addition to the trades like Variety, TV Line The Wrap and others. 
 

paterson1 wrote:

It is interesting as well that Nielsen says that Ted Lasso was the most streamed original program last year. Lasso was on Apple TV which has far fewer subscribers than Netflix, Disney+ Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+. 

 

Apple TV relies entirely on original productions while viewing on the other services is heavily library. Apple also allows viewing of the fist 2-3 episodes of a series without a subscription.