2.4 million new young TV viewers to materialize

By Gary Levin
USA Today

Has there been a miraculous population boom? No. Nielsen Media Research merely is adjusting its estimates of the viewing population, as it does each fall, to coincide with the start of the new TV season.

Usually, Nielsen's annual tweaking is a nonevent: Any single age group grows at most 1 percent from year to year. But this year there's a once-in-a-decade difference: Nielsen readjusts its TV audience figures every 10 years to reflect U.S. Census data, and this fall's will take into account changes tracked by the 2000 count.

The adjustment reveals that Nielsen's annual projections over the previous nine years severely underestimated the growth in the youngest segment of viewers.

Ages 12-17 will be adjusted up 4.8 percent, while ages 18-24 will grow 9.6 percent. Those Nielsen figures are used to measure TV's most-watched shows, and provide a yardstick to determine billions of dollars paid to the networks for advertising time.

The discovery may not affect what we see in the new season, but for networks courting younger viewers, such as WB, Fox, UPN and MTV, the Nielsen corrections mean an instant boost in audience levels — and in ad-dollar payoffs.

Conversely, networks reaching older viewers may suffer from Nielsen's reckoning of no growth among that segment — despite an influx of baby boomers — because earlier estimates were overly generous.

"If you're WB, Fox or UPN, you're finally getting credit for all of those viewers that were not accurately measured for many years," says Initiative Media analyst Stacey Lynn Koerner. "And for networks like CBS ... it's not necessarily working in their favor."

"We're all smiling here on this adjustment," says WB president Jed Petrick. "We assume we've been undercounted for a long time. But we built WB to cater to that group because we knew the older networks were ignoring it."

And some of those networks — now confronted with startling growth among the young viewers that many advertisers crave — may now pursue them even more aggressively. Shows including WB's "Smallville" and Fox's "The Simpsons," popular among teens and young adults, will see their audiences grow even if ratings stay flat.

Nielsen ratings are expressed as a percentage of a population: A show with a 6 rating among any age group, for instance, means 6 percent of those potential viewers are watching.

But advertisers pay based on the number of viewers they reach.

"If the rating translates to more people, you can make more money," says CBS research chief David Poltrack. "Sales departments wait for these numbers anxiously and hope they can give them a more favorable basis to sell."

One factor driving a sudden increase among teens (up nearly 5 percent over last season) and the youngest adults is a startling change in the Hispanic population as measured by Nielsen. This fall, they will represent 10 percent of U.S. TV homes, up from 8 percent. In recent years, that percentage has been virtually unchanged, even as the number of Hispanics — an especially young group — has grown sharply.

The shift is one more example in networks' long-simmering feud over discrepancies with Nielsen, the only authoritative source of ratings information.

And the timing was a further worry: The preliminary estimates were delayed by census-data revisions and weren't delivered to networks and advertisers until late May, after they'd already begun selling ad time for the new season.

"They were probably two to three weeks late," says ABC research chief Larry Hyams.

Some sponsors will have to adjust their already completed ad plans to account for a jump in audience.

"From an advertiser perspective, things could be a little screwy; it just means double work," he says.