Why VideoAmp Thinks It Can Bust Nielsen’s TV Ratings Monopoly
With viewership data underpinning $60 billion in television advertising, an industry behemoth is suddenly facing questions about whether it is “bringing an abacus to an AI fight.”
Pacing the stage at a conference in New York City in mid-September, VideoAmp CEO Peter Liguori made his pitch to a room full of advertising and media executives as to why they should use his company to measure television ratings instead of industry giant Nielsen. The choice, he said, was no mere matter of preference, given the landscape of plunging TV ad revenues.
“Your very survival is on stage here,” he said dramatically, displaying a picture of himself in front of a fossilized dinosaur. “You could lead the critical change—we could do it together—because if we don’t, we’re going to wind up in that museum visiting each other.”
For more than 70 years, Nielsen has held a near monopoly on tracking viewership, providing the ratings data—known in the industry as “currency”—on which more than $60 billion of TV advertising is transacted in the United States each year and billions more in content programming decisions are made. But while Nielsen still controls around 90% of the currency market, companies like VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot have made inroads.
Source: Forbes