YouTube to Work With Nielsen Ratings in 2014

Working with TV advertisers means speaking their language. Google has announced that YouTube will be included in Nielsen's TV-plus-online ratings service starting in early 2014, offering advertisers a consistent measurement across television and the web's largest video site. YouTube already works with comScore's Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE) system, but Nielsen is the lingua franca for TV advertisers.

By adopting Nielsen measurements, YouTube could see a strong increase to its ad performance. Those are the thoughts of Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, who wrote this in a letter to investors: “We have previously heard first-hand that at the individual media agency level, as much as tens of millions of dollars of advertising budgets have been left on the table at several agencies because of Google’s refusal to allow OCR tags."

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Google will first offer Nielsen measures in a test with some advertisers. Following testing, measurement tags should be in place across YouTube and other Google properties by early 2014. The paper noted that some advertisers previously reduced their ads on YouTube because they didn't want to accept Google's own data.

"I am not going to buy from Turner and accept an affidavit from Turner saying their TV ads work, am I?," said a media buying executive quoted in the Wall Street Journal.