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- Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel aims to improve audience-measurement accuracy for sports leagues and advertisers.
- For the first time, streaming platforms must share their audience data for accurate measurement, affecting business leverage.
- This article is part of “The Business of Sports,” a series on the teams, leagues, and brands turning competition into big business.
This month, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint, Paul Ballew, the National Football League’s chief data and analytics officer, said that Nielsen — widely regarded as the top media-audience measurement company — is not equipped to accurately capture the number of people watching each of the league’s games.
“There are millions of viewers that we believe they are systematically undercounting,” Ballew told Flint.
Ballew’s comments came as Nielsen rolled out its new audience-engagement tool, called Big Data + Panel, which is meant to more accurately count program viewership in the nascent ad-supported streaming era. For now, television viewership is still king.
“It’s still very important,” Andrew Marchand, a sports media reporter for The Athletic, told Business Insider. “It’s where they are still earning — for most major leagues — the bulk of their revenue.”
As platforms like Amazon Prime Video and Peacock strike multimillion-dollar deals with professional sports leagues, it seems that they are giving up some of their leverage: For Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel to work as intended, streaming services must go public with their first-party data, which they’ve long kept private for their own financial incentives.
Why streaming platforms are relinquishing some of their business leverage
Historically, streaming companies have been reluctant to share viewership data, and there’s no industrywide standard for streaming-specific viewership metrics.
Additionally, streaming services have found a competitive advantage in largely keeping their viewership data out of the public eye: The less the competition knows about a streaming company’s subscribers, viewership, marketing efforts, and overall success, the more business leverage they have.
That dynamic is changing now, at least partially, as streamers increasingly buy broadcast rights from professional sports leagues. Ballew’s criticism of Nielsen highlights this complex and changing business relationship, ushered in by the ad-supported streaming era.
As Flint noted in his interview with Ballew, the NFL has clear stakes in the viewership-counting debate: Sports leagues sell their broadcasting rights to television networks and streaming platforms. Third-party audience measurement companies like Nielsen calculate how many people watch live sporting events, which informs the rates advertisers pay to networks for commercials aired during games. Professional sports leagues use those audience numbers to help sell the live rights to their games.
Only recently have streaming platforms prioritized live sporting events, creating a greater need to sell live-event advertisements, David Bockino, a sports media and analytics professor at Elon University who previously worked in ad sales at ESPN, told Business Insider.
Since the ads that appear on streaming platforms’ television shows and movies are targeted to specific audiences and sold differently than the ads that appear to audiences watching live sports, stakeholders tend to want more data before striking big multi-year deals, said Bockino.
“Opening up ad tiers means that you’re going to have to be more transparent with your data if you’re trying to sell live events,” Bockino said.
That means that advertisements on a streaming-based show like “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which viewers can watch at any time they please, typically cost less than the advertisements for a Thursday Night Football game, which is an on-demand event.
Kenny Gersh, Major League Baseball’s executive vice president of media and business operations, told Business Insider that he approved of Nielsen’s data-tracking efforts with Big Data + Panel and said that an industry standard for measuring viewership would benefit advertisers in particular.
“I think it is important to make sure that we’re capturing all the different ways that people in 2025 are consuming content versus the way they were in 2010 or 2000,” Gersh said.
The future of viewership measurement in live sports
Ultimately, viewer measurement remains an imperfect practice susceptible to stakeholders’ desired spin.
Even with Big Data + Panel, it is too logistically difficult for Nielsen to place the tools in every US home to monitor viewer habits. Nielsen uses statistical sampling — collecting data from a group of participants, then extrapolating that data to draw broader conclusions about total audiences. Though the firm has tried to account for variables like out-of-home viewing — like watching a football game in a bar — it hasn’t been able to account for unknown variables, like if a person turns on a program, but then leaves that room or the house.
Bockino said that we’ve never truly known how many people watched an NFL game — and perhaps we never will.
Still, sports leagues may reap one benefit of these new efforts toward greater transparency and data collection: a spike in reported viewership numbers.
That has been the case through the first two weeks of the 2025 NFL season. As Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch reported while analyzing the NFL’s “record” Week 1 ratings, Nielsen is using Big Data + Panel as the standard for audience measurement, but is comparing it to previous panel-only data. Nielsen also expanded its “out-of-home” viewing markets in the past year.
“Between those two changes, viewership this season will generally have a built-in advantage over all prior years,” Lewis wrote.
The NBA, which saw its television ratings drop early last season, may be an interesting test case this season, as it welcomes streaming audiences through Amazon Prime Video and Peacock.
Despite the imperfections of the practice, Bockino doesn’t see any other company taking over for Nielsen. He said that Nielsen’s tools remain the industry standard and that sticking with Nielsen allows continuity in comparing ratings year-over-year.
“We’re thrilled that clients are embracing Big Data + Panel and that they’ve helped us make it currency for the new TV season,” a Nielsen spokesperson said in an email statement to Business Insider.”We’ve worked hand-in-hand with our clients for years to get to this point and we’re proud to be the first company to earn accreditation for this new frontier in measurement.”
Bockino said that if ratings go down, he predicts that leagues will start grumbling about Nielsen’s tools being inadequate for measuring viewership.
“They just want the numbers to look as good as possible.”
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