The Nielsen Company announced the launch of an expanded panel and platform for measuring Internet audiences. The new panel increases Nielsen’s measurement of Web sites from 3,000 to more than 30,000, provides better representation of Hispanics, teens, and cell phone-only households, and improves coverage of multiple personal computers in households. The new Internet measurement panel is more than eight times larger than Nielsen’s previous sample.
“There is incredible demand for more accurate, reliable and high-quality Web audience measurement. Nielsen’s new panel is a huge leap forward in measurement to address that …

John Burbank, Nielsen Online
For years, it has been assumed that home internet usage would cannibalize live television viewing, but there’s something interesting happening between social networking and live television.  Could it be that what Pete Blackshaw termed “telecommunities” – people simultaneously watching live television programs and chatting in real time with an online network of like-minded fans - will gain scale and give consumers a reason to stick with live viewing?
Let’s look at what happened during the Oscars.
During this year’s broadcast, we used Nielsen’s “Convergence Panel” – a sample of homes in which we …

Viewing of video on television, Internet and mobile devices — the Three Screens — continues to increase and has hit record levels.  Nielsen’s fourth quarter A2/M2 Three Screen Report reports that the average American watches more than 151 hours of TV per month, an all-time high.  They are also watching several hours of video on other devices: those who watch it on the Internet consume another 3 hours of online video per month, and those who use mobile video watch nearly 4 hours per month on mobile phones and other devices.
“The …

Jon Gibs
On February 6th, John Burbank and I led a Webinar about online brand advertising, and we came to this conclusion – publishers need to change what they’re doing to attract the best long-term advertising partners. Who are these most-coveted of advertisers? Long-term advertising partners tend to buy consistently in large volumes and high concentrations on just a few sites. They advertise more frequently on media brands with cultural cache – brands that friends are likely to recommend to each other.
So how do you court these long-term partners? First …

Nielsen today released its first public rankings of online individual TV programs, and ABC.com’s “Lost” led the way with 1.4 million unique viewers in December. NBC.com’s “Saturday Night Live” was close behind with 1.1 million unique viewers, followed by “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC.com with 879,000 unique viewers.
Top 10 Online Broadcast TV Network Entertainment Programs* for December 2008 ranked by Unique Viewers (U.S.)

Rank
Program
Network
Unique Viewers

1
Lost
ABC.com
1,425,000

2
Saturday Night Live
NBC.com
1,111,000

3
Grey’s Anatomy
ABC.com
879,000

4
Desperate Housewives
ABC.com
723,000

5
Heroes
NBC.com
685,000

6
Ugly Betty
ABC.com
631,000

7
Samantha Who?
ABC.com
560,000

8
Scrubs
ABC.com
519,000

9
Survivor
CBS Television
496,000

10
True Beauty
ABC.com
462,000

“Source: Nielsen Online, VideoCensus
*Reflects video content on ABC.com, CBS Television, CWTV.com, FOX Broadcasting,
and NBC.com, …

The column below, by John Burbank, CEO, Nielsen Online, was recently published in Adweek.
Want a firsthand lesson in the health of the Internet? Ask a friend a simple question: “What’s your favorite online ad?”
Chances are they’ll have a tough time giving an answer. Some may mention a dancing girl seducing you to refinance a mortgage; others may bring up one of the online executions of the Mac vs. PC television campaign.
But many people cannot recall any online advertising, despite all the time each of us spends on the Web and …