Nexstar Media Group has agreed to a multiyear extension of its agreement with Nielsen, which will continue as a preferred provider of local and national TV audience-measurement services to the broadcaster.
The agreement follows a similar announcement from Comscore earlier this month.
The new deal with Nielsen covers ratings for Nexstar TV stations in 116 markets, The CW Network, NewsNation and Antenna TV.
Nexstar signed previous deals with Nielsen in 2020 and Comscore in 2019.
Last year, Nexstar invited measurement companies to submit proposals for improved audience measurement and complained that its viewership was being understated.
Nielsen, which has long dominated TV’s audience-measurement business, has been under pressure from a group of newer companies that use big data from set-top boxes and smart TVs to estimate how many viewers are tuned in.
Companies are also looking to cut costs, including how much they spend on research.
Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed, but Nexstar’s decision to keep both Nielsen and Comscore shows that Nielsen still has a good grip on the industry as it rolls out Nielsen One, which adds big data to measure a more fragmented environment in which streaming increasingly dominates viewing.
“We are pleased to extend our relationship with Nielsen and are excited about the potential for Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement solution to more accurately measure all the places where consumers engage with Nexstar’s valuable content — over the air, via cable and satellite, over-the-top, online and out-of-home,” said Nexstar chief revenue officer Michael Strober said.
After The CW added LIV Golf to its lineup last February, Nexstar hired iSpot.TV and VideoAmp to measure the audience across platforms and got numbers significantly different from Nielsen’s figures.
“Nexstar is a valued, longstanding customer, and we’re proud to continue to serve as one of its preferred providers of audience data and ad measurement,” Amilcar Perez, chief revenue officer at Nielsen, said. “Nielsen’s unique mix of unrivaled data-science expertise, paired with our comprehensive measurement, sets us apart from other providers. We remain committed to bringing the industry and our customers data they can trade on with confidence.”
