Enter the Wild West of Viewership Fraud
There’s a battle brewing out there, between the corporations that produce content and anyone who wants to know how popular that content actually is. Today’s story is about Nielsen and TV, with a focus on sports, but the issue is broader, as large brands get smarter about how to astroturf a positive consensus about their projects.
Take YouTube, for example, which started hiding Dislikes on videos back in November. I happened to like the Dislike. It informed an essay I premiered this newsletter with, because the sheer volume of Dislikes on YouTube’s Nike ads indicated that their commercials were loathsome on a visceral level. True, my methodology was imperfect, but how else can you demonstrate that a mega corporation’s message is hated?
And that’s the problem, I suppose. Major brands don’t want to be exposed when they fail, so they very much Dislike the Dislike. When YouTube hid it, they claimed it’s because they “want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.” Hey, this is really about protecting the beautiful souls of artists, and any benefit gained by major multinationals is purely incidental, of course. Also, thankfully, Nike now feels safe and finally has an opportunity to succeed.
Powerful brands would prefer to control the narrative. That’s what this fight is all about, even if some involved in it are more concerned with the numbers than with that narrative. Consciously or unconsciously, these corporations seek a world where success is almost tautological. They want a closed loop where their products are hits because they insist they are hits and all contrary evidence is hidden.
Such preferences in the TV business are starting to undermine what used to be a fairly objective standard, checked by the necessities of advertisers. Nielsen has delivered the goods on broadcasting popularity since before televisions existed, back when they were reporting on radio market share. Broadcasters always bitched and moaned about their methodology, but only recently, driven by pandemic-era complications, have we seen a real movement to break away from the Nielsen standard.
In the meantime, broadcasters are reporting some impressive numbers that look, well, funny. We saw it with the most recent Super Bowl, the NCAA men’s championship, and even HBO’s Euphoria.
Euphoria, if you don’t know, is a critically acclaimed HBO show starring Zendaya. It is reputed to be popular with younger people, and it certainly is popular with some younger people. But the scale is hard to gauge, given that HBO’s numbers are difficult to buy, even if prestige media outlets are running with these totals that look fairly fake.