Migration To The Net Causes Some Ripples

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday April 17, 2008

Paul McIntyre

It was a great headline and trend line and one which has sent the television industry feral. According to Nielsen Online's 10th annual internet and technology report, the amount of time Australians spend watching TV has finally been usurped by the internet.

Last year Nielsen Online claimed we were watching 13.3 hours of TV every week, a decline for the first time in a decade of tracking, while online usage had outstripped the box with 13.7 hours a week.

There were all sorts of questions raised by the TV sector about the robustness of Nielsen's research, but this week Anthony Fitzgerald, the chief executive of the advertising sales arm for the pay TV sector, really let rip, arguing that Nielsen Online's study was nothing short of flawed.

Fitzgerald is cranky partly because as a result of Nielsen's data and some Roy Morgan research, online players like Ninemsn have started lobbying key media buyers to divert advertising budgets out of pay TV into the online sector because they claim they can deliver greater numbers of eyeballs than pay TV can, particularly in the younger demographics.

But there are certainly discrepancies on the carve-up of time for TV versus online. The TV sector's OzTam people meter ratings panel, which measures actual activity of a TV set in a home, tells a very different story to Nielsen's numbers.

According to OzTam, the average viewer spends 23.2 hours each week watching the box, nearly 10 hours more than Nielsen's claim.

Fitzgerald said Nielsen's figures were as flawed as the radio industry's diary-based ratings because people are asked to recall what they do with their time, as against technology-based monitoring.

"Nielsen's figures are fundamentally flawed. What people claim they are doing versus what they are actually doing is always different," Fitzgerald said "We are talking about some very significant differences here. The internet claims to be the most accountable medium in the world, yet the industry can't agree on a standard measurement system."

Fitzgerald's protest also revolves around what makes up internet usage. Internet usage in Nielsen's study includes the total time people spend using email and transactional activities such as online banking - two areas which claim significant time but are not related to consuming traditional media content. "It's completely distorted," Fitzgerald argued.

He has also swung his aim to claims made last week in the Herald by Ninemsn's commercial director, Jason Scott, who said he had "a great argument against pay TV right now". Scott cited Roy Morgan's Single Source research showing online reached 78 per cent of viewers in the 16-39 age group each week compared with 21 per cent for pay TV.

"I've seen the presentation Ninemsn is making and let me say it's a truly uninspired, unsophisticated sales pitch which is based on meaningless set of broad [audience] reach figures," Fitzgerald said. "There is far more to planning and buying media than reaching numbers alone. Pay TV is not an alternative medium. We reach 30 per cent of the Australian population."

Nielsen Online's associate research director, Tony Marlow, is unmoved. "What people say [they do in research] and what people actually do is a good point," said Marlow.

"But if there is any discrepancy in what people are saying and doing, that discrepancy is equal across all media we cover."

In other words, according to Marlow, it's about the long-term trend and TV viewing has stopped growing. "We're not talking about wild movements here. For the first time in 10 years, people said the time they spent with TV didn't grow. TV has started to plateau off. The primary purpose of this report is a gauge for what people are doing with a range of media over time."

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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