Where is all the Transparency?
You can not turn on the radio, the television, or read an RSS feed in today’s economic climate without stumbling upon the word “transparency.” Yet somehow today’s media companies have been absolved from having to provide its very own industry with accurate viewership information. Earlier today I began to comment on the over-exaggerated excitement around Hulu’s boost in viewership from its television campaign. But when it came time to do the math, and calculate what percentage of the Superbowl viewing population would be required to satisfy a 50% boost in Hulu’s numbers, I immediately ran into this problem:
- This ad age article cites Nielsen as reporting January unique viewers for Hulu to be at 4.5m;
- This Neilsen Online article cites November’s unique viewers for Hulu at 7.5m;
- and this comScore article shows hulu with a whopping 24.6m unique viewers in December
Now, all I really wanted was a good estimate of Hulu’s viewership base in January… but when the numbers appear as volatile as this, I see no real point on continuing to perpetuate the inconsistencies. Can someone please shed some light on how these numbers were calculated? And why isn’t Hulu coming out with their own information amidst this lack of clarity? Even sites that implement comScore and Nielsen beacons all still (and should) have their own internal analytics. It’s ridiculous for those reporting on the industry to be faced with such convoluted information.
It should also go without saying that I would expect the same level of transparency from other leading content providers, namely ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, CW etc…