With just hours to go before its CBS television network televises what is for certain to be a heavily watched debate between two candidates for Vice President of america, Paramount Global said late Monday night that its contract with Nielsen for audience measurement has expired — a part of a broader dispute between the corporate and the information giant.
“Nielsen has severed our long-standing measurement partnership with its unacceptable demands, including substantial price increases which might be inconsistent with the realities of a changing industry,” Paramount said in a press release. “We’ve got spent the previous few years preparing for a multi-currency future and creating the operational infrastructure to maneuver beyond Nielsen. We’re confident in the standard of our alternative currency offering for clients as we proceed efforts to achieve a brand new Nielsen agreement with reasonable economic terms.”
Nielsen was not in a position to offer immediate comment.
Paramount had signaled to advertisers and their representatives last week that the corporate may be without Nielsen services. Paramount intends to depend on VideoAmp, considered one of a growing variety of rivals to Nielsen, to assist advertisers track the number of people that watch programming on Paramount’s portfolio of media assets.
At issue is a long-running criticism from TV networks that Nielsen isn’t measuring the many alternative audiences for his or her programming in addition to it should. As smartphones, mobile tablets and broadband-connected TV’s gain more consumer acceptance, audiences are increasingly in a position to stream their TV favorites in on-demand fashion, making the duty of counting them exponentially tougher. TV networks have long based their promoting rates on Nielsen’s measure of linear TV audiences, which have slipped as consumers embraced Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming and on-demand options.
At the identical time, Paramount is under extreme pressure to chop costs. The corporate is about to be acquired by Skydance Media, and its current management team has already begun working to trim $500 million from its operating structure. Skydance Media has articulated a plan under which it would cut back costs by one other $1.5 billion.
Executives at Paramount take a look at the tons of of thousands and thousands the corporate spends on Nielsen measurement every year, in line with considered one of the people conversant in the situation, and feel that paying the next fee seems ill-advised and never in the corporate’s best interest. They feel that Nielsen’s fees would in some cases exceed the whole ad revenue of the network being measured — an indication of how among the company’s cable networks have deteriorated within the streaming era.
Paramount may find itself hard-pressed to go without Nielsen for long. The corporate’s measurements proceed to form the bedrock of the economics of the media industry. Advertisers use Nielsen counts to determine how much they need to pay for commercials. The corporate expects to proceed its negotiations with Nielsen and hopes to achieve an agreement.
Nielsen and parts of Paramount have come to loggerheads previously. In 2019, CBS dropped Nielsen over an identical dispute tied to pricing. CBS was without Nielsen measures for about 11 days.
