We Have No Idea How Many People Are Watching TV Anymore

A TV show’s rating used to mean something. Sort of. Nielsen TV ratings were always an imperfect system. They were all based on relatively few households whose residents were often self-reporting their TV-watching habits.

Yet for all its faults, Nielsen garnered enough respect as a tool for measuring viewership that the fates of thousands of TV shows and ad buys over the years were decided by the numbers published by Nielsen. Its trustworthiness is now being thrown the question after the company was taken over by a private equity firm.

If you’re unfamiliar, private equity firms are the devil. I already explained it in detail in an article about the recent demise of Party City, but I’ll repeat it: private equity firms buy companies through a process called a leveraged buyout which saddles the company with so much debt that the company essentially can’t do anything other than provide its most basic service. It can’t innovate and it can’t expand.

Sometimes (in the case of Party City, a discount party supplier) it can’t even afford to offer customers discounts on products. Because every single dime it makes has to go into paying off the debt, so why discount the product when you can just make it more expensive?

(Party City also owned the biggest manufacturer of party supplies, so they had a monopoly on the whole system).

This is, essentially, a death sentence that eventually allows the private equity firm to throw its hands in the air and say, hey, we did the best we could to make this company profitable (they didn’t) but it just isn’t working. Guess we’ll have to strip it for parts and make a profit!

There’s No Way Of Knowing How Many People Are Watching Streaming Shows Or Movie Nowadays

That last part is the entire point of it all, and it’s what happening with the company that provides TV ratings. A private equity group led by an organization called Evergreen Coast Capital bought Nielsen back in 2022 and has been doing its private equity looting and plundering thing ever since—and all because Nielsen was struggling to find its footing in the streaming age.

People don’t watch things the way they used to. Nielsen started looking like a dinosaur when streamers started to self-report their viewing numbers in ways that can be generously described as creative and un-generously described as lies.

The New York Times published an article detailing the varied absurd ways different streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon report their streaming numbers. The through line in all of this is that there is no through line. They all use different metrics, and those metrics change depending on the narrative the streamer is trying to push on a given day.

As the article points out, MrBeast’s Amazon show, according to Amazon, was viewed by “more than 50 million viewers globally,” which makes it sound like a smashing success. The numbers reported by third-party measurement groups, however, paint a picture of a show that “is not a hit—no matter what data you look at how you cut it—but it also is in a flop or a bomb, either.”

In short, nobody knows what the hell is going on anymore. Nobody knows how many people are watching anything, truly, and that’s exactly how the streamers want it. They get to create their own definitions of success that are constantly being rewritten to suit their own needs. It’s all to attract advertisers who, by now, should know that the numbers they’re being pitched are complete and total bullshit that don’t mean anything.

But with no regulatory agencies forcing streamers into reporting hard cold data instead of whatever recontextualizing of their numbers that makes every piece of shit they turn out to look like a worldwide phenomenon, this is just the world are going to have to live in.

Nielsen was imperfect, but for a while there it was a steady gold standard that seems comparably better than anything we have today. Now, sadly, it’s been swallowed up by money-hungry ultra-capitalists and it’s only used to check in on how many people watched the Super Bowl.