The Urge to Converge: Nielsen’s New Cross-Platform Metrics
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Steve Smith

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Nielsen’s Long-awaited Convergence Panel to measure combined and concurrent TV and Internet usage in the same homes formally launched this week. The sample panel of 2,800 people in 1,000 households will be the first to track specific Internet habits and site travels as well as TV viewing in the same home. Ideally, the new metrics promise us a view into time spent with each platform and any relationship between content viewed on TV and subsequent or simultaneous Web activity. We might get a sense for how TV shows and ads drive online behaviors, for instance. Or we could start to understand more precisely media brand affinities. For instance, earlier research using Nielsen’s cross-platform “fusion” research found that sports followers who watched ESPN on TV and used the brand’s site spent 27% more time watching ESPN TV than TV-only viewers. Likewise, cross-platform ESPN loyalists spent 50% more time using the site than ESPN.com-only visitors. While it is not surprising that a media brand’s most loyal fans would make higher use of the brand across platforms, the Convergence Panel may help media companies better understand the real scale and habits of their core constituency. Likewise, we can imagine how solid cross-platform research also could surface affinities between TV and online brands some publishers never expected.

Some critics have raised questions about the intrusiveness of such convergence panels, since monitoring Web behaviors is perceived by many as more invasive than recording TV viewing. And yet, over a decade into widespread Internet use we have little understanding of how the TV and Internet media relate to one another, the ways in which users consumer them in tandem, and what an audience on one medium does on the other medium.

The Nielsen data will be available in monthly reports ad well as custom research.

If you have any breaking news please contact Amy Novak at anovak@accessintel.com

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