In a webinar with clients on Tuesday, Nielsen Audio announced plans to begin adjusting their audience estimates to account for headphone listening to encoded AM, FM, and HD-multicast station streams.
Starting with the October 2020 monthly survey, Nielsen intends to adjust their PPM measurements based on market, daypart, demographic, and other factors. The portable people meters will still not be able to be utilized with wireless headphones and require an adapter with wired headphones, instead Nielsen used a survey of former PPM panelists to determine adjustments to be made to its sample of aggregated QHRs to calculate AQH Persons, Rating, Share, TSL & Turnover. The adjustments will not be utilized with Cume estimates.
In the webinar Nielsen stated that the better accounting for headphone listening boosts total radio Average Quarter Hour by 2-5%. The company believes that since the headphone adjustment will increase market totals (PUMM), AQH Share estimates may be affected for all stations (whether or not they have an encoded AM/FM stream) and AQH Persons and Ratings may increase for subscribing stations who elect to combine their over the air and stream audience (Total Line Reporting) and individually reported AM, FM and HD-multicast stations that subscribe to Nielsen Audio.
To address stations that may have unusual increases in the ratings based on a single panelist or home with very heavy listening that contributes more than half of a station’s audience, Nielsen will implement a new process they are calling “Outlier Mitigation.” Any outlier will remain in the panel assuming that they are compliant and are not a security risk. However, heavy tuning to a station that exceeds a specified threshold will be trimmed to the level of the next heaviest listener from another household. Nielsen says this approach will address the most significant cases without detracting from Persons Using Measured Media (PUMM) or removing compliant homes from the panel.
