“In a letter to advertisers, [Sinclair Broadcast Group’s] EVP Steve Marks says the mega-station group will use comScore exclusively for audience measurement starting in 2018,” report our friends at TVNewsCheck.
The story continues, “In an apparent setback for Nielsen, Sinclair Broadcast Group has informed its advertisers and agencies that it will be using comScore broadcast ratings ‘exclusively’ beginning next year, according to a May 25 letter from the station group to its clients obtained by TVNewsCheck.”
The article adds, “An audience measurement upstart, comScore, which absorbed Rentrak, has been slowly cutting into Nielsen’s one-time monopoly on broadcast ratings.”
FierceCable, in its follow-up to the TVNewsCheck story, notes that in November last year “Mark Aitken, vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group, said that a big financial upside to deploying the ATSC 3.0 next-generation TV standard is the potential for collecting and analyzing viewership data.
“‘If we weren’t stuck with Nielsen and their reading of the tea leaves, we’d have tens of millions of extra dollars in our pocket,’ Aitken told FierceCable, adding that the situation between broadcasters and Nielsen has been lopsided for a long time. He added that Nielsen’s numbers are ‘imprecise.’”
To read more details about this item, please click here to read the TVNewsCheck piece, and please click here to read the FierceCable story.
This news made my week … congrats to Sinclair for being courageous against the greedy and monopolistic pricks at Nielsen … I hope other stations will immediately follow suit … as an indy TV program producer, these “A-Holes” at Nielsen wanted to charge us $15K per month to get basic info on our show (when we were only making $30K per month) — give me a freaking break … then they told our stations they were not allowed to share their info on our show to us … greedy pricks.
I want to read a story soon that says, “Neilsen Company goes bankrupt … RIP”
Sinclair, you are my heroes ….