ESPN combines TV and streaming viewers (DIS)

NFL Viewership BI Intelligence

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ESPN will begin reporting its linear TV and streaming audiences as a single viewership number starting next week, Variety reports.

In conjunction with Nielsen, ESPN will combine viewership on mobile screens and "out-of-home" viewership from bars and hotels to report Nielsen Total Audience numbers.

ESPN is rolling out the new viewership number to get a more accurate count of its true audience size. This, in turn, can help ESPN and advertisers more fairly negotiate advertising pricing.

ESPN can measure the true size of its millennial viewer base by including streaming into its viewership audience total. Younger consumers are increasingly replacing live TV viewing with content consumption on digital platforms, and including the streaming audience should lead to 5% to 7% increases on millennial audience numbers, according to ESPN Media Intelligence VP David Coletti. A bigger younger audience size can help ESPN compete for digital ad spend against companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, which have all aggressively pursued sports rights for their platforms to attract younger viewers.

Inclusion of digital audiences is especially important as live sports, and linear TV overall, face declines in viewership. Pay-TV lost a record 976,000 subscribers in Q2 of this year, and pay-TV subscriber losses this year could more than double, according to an RBC survey cited by Variety. Additionally, 48% of those surveyed by RBC indicated sports programming wasn’t important to them. Weak pay-TV subscription numbers and waning interest in sports has lead to viewership declines for ESPN — the average viewership of the 2016 NFL season was down 8% year-over-year (YoY). Including digital audiences is one way ESPN can raise viewership totals which is important because it allows it to charge more for its ad spots.

In response to declining linear TV audiences, cross-platform measurement is becoming the norm. Nielsen recently announced it would count Hulu Live TV and YouTube Live TV in its TV ratings. The measurement company also added Facebook, YouTube, and Hulu to its digital ratings in August. Nielsen will likely continue to strengthen its cross-platform measurement offerings by including more digital companies in certain viewership ratings, as viewers continue to turn away from traditional TV. Continuing to broaden its cross-platform measurement could increase the speed at which advertisers shift TV ad spend toward digital.

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