Netflix says Nielsen’s data is inaccurate—so why doesn’t it release the numbers its damn self?
The news that Nielsen has finally begun to track Netflix viewership made waves this morning, as the nearly century-old audience measurer declared its plan to shed some light on some of the greatest mysteries of our contemporary TV era. (Like “How many people are watching Fuller House, and what can be done to stop them?”) The announcement is not without its caveats: Surveying Netflix usage is meant to combat an aggravating lack of transparency on the part of the streaming platform—and competitors like Amazon and Hulu—but Nielsen won’t be making those numbers public. They’ll be distributed to clients including Disney, Warner Bros., and NBCUniversal, who’ll, oh, I don’t know, do their friends in the viewing public and the TV press a solid by releasing that information on their own?
Hoping for that type of release is its own folly, because there’s no way it’d come out without its own, requisite spin. But it feels like a move in the right direction, even though other, similar initiatives to gauge Netflix’s audience with audio-recognition software have failed to break the streamer of its private ways. What they did do, however, was yield statements like the one Netflix gave Variety, which sounds less like Silicon Valley PR jargon and more like the latest, dissembling gibberish issued from the Trump White House:
“The data that Nielsen is reporting is not accurate, not even close, and does not reflect the viewing of these shows on Netflix,” the company said in a statement.