The television news industry will finally be able to get hold of TV viewership data from March 17, 2022, after a 17-month hiatus. On Monday, BARC India announced the resumption of publishing of individual news channels ratings from Week 10 of 2022.
The decision came after the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) issued a directive on January 12, asking BARC to release TV news viewership data with immediate effect. BARC India, in its official statement mentioned, that it welcomed the directive and noted that the data will be released as per the Augmented Data Reporting Standards for news and special interest genres.
With the 5 state assembly elections being around the corner, the TV news industry was eagerly waiting for this announcement as this gives them an opportunity to bring in more ad revenue. However, the wait till March 17 has proven to be a bit of a dampener as the election results will be declared on March 10.
“The majority of news channels were hoping to get news data before the start of the assembly elections so that they could get an additional increase to their overall revenue during that period. However, since the data will be published from March 17, news channels won’t be able to take advantage of this data,” said a senior media planner on the condition of anonymity.
According to industry observers, although most ad sale deals were closed long back this could have been a good opportunity for the players who are not backed by the big networks. “Smaller players were severely impacted in the last two years due to COVID-19 and later by the blackout of TV news viewership. These channels could have capitalised on the resumption of news data.”
Interestingly, even the bigger networks were hoping to increase the ad rates to get the right value for the ad inventory. In the last 16 months, ad deals were happening based on old viewership data. This had forced a lot of channels to not increase ad rates. However, some channels have already increased the prices by 20-25 per cent for the next three months due to limited supply and high demand. In any election season, news channels earn at least 8-10 per cent of their overall top line.
The ad sales chief of a big news network told exchange4media that some news channels could have faced difficulty in hiking rates due to the absence of data. And now the further delay of 5-6 weeks has impacted the chances of news channels to gain from the data roll-out. “But in the bigger picture, ratings will help news channels - both smaller and bigger ones - to revise their pricing and hike ad rates.”
In the weeks leading up to the resumption of news channels ratings, BARC India will be reaching out to its constituents to sufficiently inform and educate them about the details of the Augmented Data Reporting Standards. According to BARC, the Augmented Standards entail the reporting of audience estimates for News and Special Interest genre channels on a 4-week rolling average basis, which would be released regularly every week along with the estimates for all other channels. All viewership data will be published on the YUMI platform that subscribers use, the body has said.
BARC has sought the active support of the Technical Committee members, all its stakeholders and industry experts, to come up with a statistically sound and effective solution that will help augment the robustness of the data and reporting.
On October 15, 2020, in the wake of the TRP scam, the BARC Board had proposed that its Technical Committee (Tech Comm) needs to review and augment the current standards of measuring and reporting the data of niche genres for improving their statistical robustness and to significantly hamper potential attempts of infiltrating the panel homes. This exercise covered all Hindi, Regional, English News and Business News channels with immediate effect.
BARC ceased publishing the weekly individual ratings for all news channels during the exercise that was expected to take around 8-12 weeks, including validation and testing under the supervision of BARC’s Tech Comm, but the process lasted for 15 months.