After a one-year-long hiatus, Zee News has made a comeback on the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC). Highly placed sources confirmed that the channel resumed the service from September 18 and its first rolling data was published yesterday.
When contacted by e4m, Mona Jain, Chief Revenue Officer, Zee Media Corporation Ltd confirmed saying, "Yes we are back in BARC."
Zee Bharat have also made a comeback on BARC. The data released yesterday showed Zee numbers for the first time since September of 2022.
Sources in the industry hinted that other major channels, including NDTV and News X, that walked out of the rating system last year are also likely to resume before the year-end.
“This confirms that rating system is not just credible but also essential for the channels. After suffering losses, the channel decided to make a comeback and has performed decently as per its latest data,” said a senior industry person.
Zee Media, which runs 14 national and regional news channels in 10 languages, pulled out of BARC in September 2022.
The company, a part of the Essel group, sent a letter to the TV viewership measurement company informing the decision to exit the service subscription as it then claimed to have issues with the data.
Sources claimed Zee news channels were said to be losing on advertising after they exited BARC. Several advertisers were staying away from the channel as their was no way to audit its viewership performance.
Earlier in September 2022, the news broadcaster pulled out of the TV audience measurement system, citing the landing page issue as a reason for taking such a drastic step.
ZMCL had then said that it had been consistently requesting BARC India to take corrective measures with regard to the landing page issue. The news broadcaster had said that the landing page data should not be included in the final viewership and the duration for counting viewership be increased to 2 minutes.
