Fox, ESPN Cry Foul Over Big Nielsen Number Expected for YouTube’s NFL Brazil Game

Even before YouTube streams its NFL game Friday night in Brazil between the Chiefs and Chargers, other league rights holders are crying foul over the Nielsen viewership count that hasn’t been released yet.

Senior analytics leaders from Fox and ESPN each lobbied separate public complaints about a non-accredited audience measurement that is planned for the game on YouTube. The contest, available for free on YouTube to a worldwide audience, is expected to become the most-streamed game in NFL history.

“Nielsen’s measurement of tonight’s YouTube game will not be made available to other Nielsen clients, a flagrant departure from Nielsen’s history of transparency and a slap in the face to longstanding clients,” Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill tweeted late Friday afternoon. “When it comes to streamers, the rules simply don’t apply.”

He continued, “Nielsen’s strength isn’t in perfect accuracy, I don’t say that in a snarky way. Their value comes from impartiality and transparency. When they move away from those tenets they undermine what makes them the only essential data source in media.”

Minutes later, ESPN SVP of research Flora Kelly picked up the narrative with her own broadside against Nielsen.

“With the start of football comes Nielsen changes (Big Data, new times, etc.),” Kelly tweeted. “And the latest wrinkle: a custom methodology Nielsen created for YouTube’s NFL game. Not the same approach as the rest of us, nor [Media Rating Council] accredited. Conclusion … their rating is not a fair comp.”

Sources confirmed to Front Office Sports that the YouTube game will use a custom Nielsen process separate from the newly implemented and much-ballyhooed Big Data + Panel methodology. The reason for that largely stems from timing, the sources said, as YouTube did not have sufficient time, in Nielsen’s view, to have proper audience inputs for its accredited workflow, particularly relating to first-party streaming data. 

The audience count from the Brazil game, a key part of the league’s burgeoning international strategy, is expected to come out early next week. In terms of process, the figure will more closely resemble Amazon NFL data from Thursday Night Football games in 2023, before Nielsen gained accreditation for the inclusion of first-party streaming data in its national figures beginning in 2024. That means that regardless of what the final count will be from Friday’s game, the complaints from other networks are likely to continue.

Beyond mere bragging rights, the stakes around the ongoing audience measurement debates are enormous. 

Billions of dollars in advertising are spent on NFL games each year, and even small swings in viewership and resulting advertising rates can have significant impacts. Ultimately, those metrics also help inform rights fees agreements, and the NFL is a virtual lock to open up most of its domestic deals after the 2029 season.

As Nielsen has introduced Big Data + Panel, and with it a promise of more accurate viewership data, the NFL remains frustrated with Nielsen, in part due to a perceived undercounting of audiences in other respects. Among the specific issues for the league is people watching games in groups at one home, known as co-viewing in Nielsen data.

Viewership drama also surrounded the first NFL game of the season Thursday after a 65-minute weather delay blunted the contest between the Cowboys and Eagles.