The Nielsen of the U.K. Has Cracked Its Way Into Netflix’s Ratings

Illustration: Martin Gee

Residents of the United Kingdom have universal health care, The Great British Baking Show, and, soon, something else for the rest of the world to envy: daily third-party ratings for Netflix programs. The U.S.-based streaming giant has officially joined the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, which means that starting next month, its programs will be included in the ratings company’s daily and weekly reports estimating how many viewers are watching various networks and platforms as well as individual titles. It feels like a potential watershed, one that could lead to far greater streaming-data transparency in other big markets around the world — including the U.S.

Here in the States, Nielsen does offer a hint of how streaming programs are performing with certain audiences. It puts out a weekly tally of the top-ten programs and movies as measured by millions of minutes consumed within a week on home-based platforms (mobile and laptop viewing isn’t included, so good luck knowing what Gen Z is watching). While there’s definitely utility in those numbers, they’re presented in a much different way than traditional ratings and aren’t easily comparable: Nielsen doesn’t publicly report an average audience size for shows, for example, or what percentage of the daily available audience streamed something. Plus, Nielsen’s streaming data takes a full month to compile, so by the time we get a look at a show’s performance, the information already feels a bit dated.

But BARB’s numbers should be a lot more useful. For one thing, it will be issuing a daily snapshot of how both the overall Netflix service and its various programs performed among British audiences during the previous 24 hours — exactly the same way it measures viewing for its more than 300 other linear and streaming-based members. BARB has actually been measuring and reporting streaming data since last November, with Amazon’s Prime Video and Disney+ both subscribers. Last month, for example, it reported that the fourth episode of Disney+’s She-Hulk was seen by 1.61 million British viewers in its first week of release, while Thor: Love and Thunder was seen by 2.2 million during that same period. BARB has also had numbers for Netflix since last year, but because Netflix wasn’t a client, it didn’t regularly report how its shows were doing. When its new streaming ratings were launched, however, BARB revealed that its ratings showed that Squid Game was the tenth most-watched show in the U.K. during the month of October 2021, with 5.8 million viewers — about 3 million fewer than The Great British Bake Off, which is seen there on British broadcaster Channel 4 (and goes by a slightly different name).

Now that Netflix is a client, we will likely get a regular stream of numbers for its shows. For example, BARB says the streamer last month was the fourth most-watched platform in the U.K., behind BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, but ahead of pay network Sky TV and linear network Channel 5 (owned by Paramount Global). With Netflix included, we’ll now get a consistent picture of how much viewing time it — and other streamers — is stealing from linear platforms and how consumption habits change every month.

And yet don’t expect to know how every Netflix show is doing — and certainly not on a daily basis. Like Nielsen, BARB makes only a sliver of its data available to the public every day, and when it comes to individual titles, the company usually reveals only 50 of the most-watched titles within a given day, week, or month. Because streaming viewership is less concentrated — people watch when they want versus during a scheduled time slot — it means even some notable Netflix titles might not pop up in the overnight, single-day tallies. Instead, as with Prime and Disney+, we’ll likely see the streamer’s biggest shows appear first in the weekly and then monthly reports.

In a press release announcing the deal with BARB, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings sounded like a man who has long been open to third-party measurement of his platform even though, well … he has not always been so enthusiastic. “Back in 2019, at the RTS conference in Cambridge, I welcomed the idea of Netflix audiences being measured independently,” Hastings said. “We’ve kept in touch with BARB since then and are pleased to make a commitment to its trusted measurement of how people watch television in the UK.” Left unsaid is what has changed since 2019, which is that Netflix has abandoned its dogmatic opposition to advertising appearing on the service, and it will begin offering a tier of service with limited ads — as soon as November 1 in some markets (including the U.S. and the U.K.), per an August report from The Wall Street Journal. That means advertisers will want to know who’s watching what on the service, and how often, so they can negotiate prices for their commercials. While Hastings might have been philosophically open to eventually embracing outside eyes measuring Netflix, the launch of advertising makes such third-party data of some sort almost inevitable.

And that leaves one big question: Now that Netflix has pacted with BARB, whither the United States — and Nielsen? Nielsen has worked hard to expand its streaming ratings, both in terms of products it offers to clients and in what it reports to the public. Advertisers here will surely want more data, too, so it seems logical there will be more third-party measurement of Netflix content in the U.S. soon as well. Stay tuned.