Nielsen ratings for YouTube partners raise more questions than they answer

June 27, 2012
By Michael Estrin

The first Nielsen ratings for YouTube’s premium partners are out. Hurray! Well, not so fast. Turns out, we can use the ratings in much the same way a drunk uses a street light — more for support than illumination.

So what do the numbers tell us?

For starters, they support the claim that YouTube is the top online video destination. From a Nielsen blog post:

“To put this into context, YouTube continues to be the top online video destination in the U.S. with over 136 million unique viewers who streamed 16 billion videos during May 2012.”

But as Christophor Rick points out at ReelSEO, the exact numbers on YouTube are a little suspect.

“Surprisingly, the comScore videos number (17.6B) matches quite closely to the Nielsen streams number of 16.5B. Yet, the unique viewer numbers are off by a larger margin 136M to 151.6M. As far as I’m concerned what this all goes to show is that we, as an industry, need to demand two things from the largest providers of these monthly numbers; transparency and standardization.”

I’m all for transparency and standardization, too. But the Nielsen numbers don’t just raise questions about a disparity between comScore and Nielsen on the unique viewers metric. Unlike comScore, which seems focused on platforms, Nielsen’s numbers are tracking specific YouTube channels. And for me, that’s where the real trouble starts, because I’m not sure we can say with certainty which of the 100-plus YouTube partner channels is leading the pack. Here’s Nielsen’s top five YouTube partner channels:

Vevo
WMG
Machinima
Fullscreen
Maker

Congrats to those channels, right? Well, yes and no. The problem is that “channel” isn’t really the right word to describe all of these partners. Machinima, for example, has eight total YouTube channels. There’s the main channel, simply called Machinima, and then there are seven additional channels, each with a specific content target like “Sports” or “Trailer Vault.” And then there’s Maker Studios, which claims to have 500 YouTube channels! But Maker may be an easier web to untangle than, say, Fullscreen, which aggregates on a massive scale.

I emailed Nielsen reps with a few questions. While they assured me that they planned to publish a more complete ratings guide of all the YouTube channels down the road, they didn’t comment on whether or not their rankings count all of a partner’s channels together. That means that when Nielsen says Machinima is #3, we don’t know if that means the main Machinima channel is #3, or if all eight taken together brought that partner to the #3 spot. Surely, there’s a difference. But right now, it’s hard to take these ratings all that seriously. Think about this way: Nielsen does the same thing for television. They can tell you which network is number one and which show is number one. They can even add up the metrics for all of the networks they report on and tell you which media company is number one. But when it comes to YouTube, Nielsen can’t get very granular. That’s a big problem.

But for what it’s worth, here are the top YouTube channels. Whatever that means.

Source: Nielsen

Videonomics

Nielsen ratings for YouTube partners raise more questions than they answer

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