UKOM will be publishing a new monthly audience summary, showing the performance of the top 100 online media owners.
This report is available to all as a free download. The August 2011 edition can be found here
If you have any suggestions or comments, please email James Smythe
UKOM has started the process of finding a measurement partner for 2013 onwards, when the current contract with Nielsen expires.
This process is scheduled to last until December 2011, when the partner will be announced. Over the course of 2012, systems will be developed or changed in order to meet the specified UKOM standards for January 2013.
Over the second quarter of this year, UKOM conducted an industry consultation to establish a consensus on requirements for the years ahead. This has led to significant changes to UKOM’s requirements from its partner, including the need to measure all devices and locations including mobile, build on the basics of reach and frequency with more metrics, and to provide greater customer, training and educational support to the industry.
A call for expressions of interest was sent out to research providers, and in early August a brief was issued to half a dozen research companies with experience in digital audience measurement, including our current partners Nielsen. The process of selecting a partner will continue until December this year.
UKOM will continue to develop the current product with Nielsen, including the assessment of their hybrid measurement system, until the end of the current contract.
UKOM and Nielsen are collaborating on a test to assess Nielsen’s new hybried measurement methodology in the UK market.
Nielsen’s approach to Hybrid measurement combines the established panel-based system with server data from websites that add the Nielsen tag to their webpages and video players. This approach combines the robust and people-centric advantages of the panel with the total page views traffic offered by server data. Nielsen use the server data to estimate the gap in panel-based audiences, and create a complete “all devices and locations” measure for each web property.
The first stage of testing has involved tagging a number of UK media owners’ sites and applications, and establishing how well the Nielsen tag-based page views figure matches media owners’ own analytics data. This test was conducted in August.
UKOM will publish updates as technical testing progresses.
IAB Australia has today announced that The Neilsen Company has been chosen as preferred supplier for their national online audience measurement system.
http://www.iabaustralia.com.au/index.php?/news/story/online_audience_measurement_tender_-_winner_announced
Nielsen’s system was chosen by a cross-industry panel, using both technical and commercial considerations, and beat all the other established providers to the contract.
UKOM is working closely with Nielsen to approve its hybrid methodology for a UK roll-out in the coming months. At the same time, UKOM is conducting a strategy review and will be holding a re-tender process in the second half of this year for the UKOM contract due to start from January 2013.
Nielsen have started to roll out Video Census, its new video audience measurement tool.
Using the accurate demographics and audience estimates of UKOM’s panel, Video Census combines this with census data on video streams served with the Nielsen tag embedded.
Video Census is an important step forwards in industry oversight of video audience measurement. The process of UKOM’s technical group reviewing Video Census has highlighted how much more is expected in future – not just from measurement providers but also from the industry in agreeing standards that can be used to compare online video measures to traditional TV measures.
UKOM’s endorsement of this tool comes into effect with the release of July data in August, when Nielsen will have fully implemented improvements to the processing of census data on tagged video properties.
Read more in Media Week here
UKOM has started a regular newsletter called Web Sight. It’s for planners and salespeople, featuring data insights and thought pieces. Click here if you want to be added to the distribution list.
Featuring a record month for YouTube UK at 19.6m users. Subscribers can access this data at Nielsen Answers, or if you don’t subscribe topline data is available on the UKOM site or via MediaTel
Since the data processing problem identified late last year, Nielsen and UKOM have been working on a plan to re-calculate audience data for February to October last year and re-publish. This process is now complete, and users of UKOM data in Nielsen’s Answers system will now see the new data. Data published since November 2010 were not affected by the problem so have not been re-published.
UKOM is currently working with the industry-wide Technical Group and Nielsen to validate and approve Nielsen’s Video Census system, due for launch in April 2011. With the progress being made by VOD broadcasters and audience levels, robust and industry-approved measurement of online video audiences is critical to VOD as an advertising medium. UKOM’s staff and Technical Group (comprising media owner and agency heads of research from around the business) have been reviewing Nielsen’s Video Census product at length, and are working hard towards achieving a product which has UKOM accreditation by the spring. One of the key issues is the industry’s own definition of a video stream. With broadcasters using a wide variety of methods to split their content into streams, UKOM is working on ways in which these can be translated into clearer measures of volume and opportunities to advertise. Because of the need to validate quality and establish consensus first, UKOM will often take longer to approve and release products than privately owned measurement products.