With just hours to go before its CBS television network televises what is certain to be a heavily watched debate between two candidates for Vice President of the United States, Paramount Global said late Monday night that its contract with Nielsen for audience measurement has expired — part of a broader dispute between the company and the data giant.
“Nielsen has severed our long-standing measurement partnership with its unacceptable demands, including substantial price increases that are inconsistent with the realities of a changing industry,” Paramount said in a statement. “We have spent the last few years preparing for a multi-currency future and creating the operational infrastructure to move beyond Nielsen. We are confident in the quality of our alternative currency offering for clients as we continue efforts to reach a new Nielsen agreement with reasonable economic terms.”
Nielsen was not able to offer immediate comment.
Paramount had signaled to advertisers and their representatives last week that the company might be without Nielsen services. Paramount intends to rely on VideoAmp, one of a growing number of rivals to Nielsen, to help advertisers track the number of people who watch programming on Paramount’s portfolio of media assets.
At issue is a long-running complaint from TV networks that Nielsen isn’t measuring the many different audiences for their programming as well as it should. As smartphones, mobile tablets and broadband-connected TV’s gain more consumer acceptance, audiences are increasingly able to stream their TV favorites in on-demand fashion, making the task of counting them exponentially more difficult. TV networks have long based their advertising 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 same time, Paramount is under extreme pressure to cut costs. The company 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 reduce costs by another $1.5 billion.
Executives at Paramount look at the hundreds of millions the company spends on Nielsen measurement each year, according to one of the people familiar with the situation, and feel that paying a higher fee seems ill-advised and not in the company’s best interest. They feel that Nielsen’s fees would in some cases exceed the total ad revenue of the network being measured — a sign of how some of the company’s cable networks have deteriorated in the streaming era.
Paramount may find itself hard-pressed to go without Nielsen for long. The company’s measurements continue to form the bedrock of the economics of the media industry. Advertisers use Nielsen counts to figure out how much they should pay for commercials. The company expects to continue its negotiations with Nielsen and hopes to reach an agreement.
Nielsen and parts of Paramount have come to loggerheads in the past. In 2019, CBS dropped Nielsen over a similar dispute tied to pricing. CBS was without Nielsen measures for about 11 days.
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