This paragraph can be read as one long veiled reference to a recent post on Medium from media investor David Pakman of Venrock, former CEO of eMusic.
In that post, which was entitled “May I Have Your Attention Please,” Pakman talked about how attention has shifted and is continuing to shift away from traditional forms of media to new platforms such as Twitch (which streams video people playing video games), as well as Snapchat and others.
“The behavior of the young is predictive of the future. Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, WhatsApp, Instagram, Vine and YouNow were all catalyzed by teen use first, and later spread to older age groups,” Pakman wrote. “If you want to know which companies to bet on, just follow the attention.” The post got some push-back from a number of media-watchers, including Joe Marchese of Fox Networks, who said — in a response very similar to the one Nielsen makes in its report — that this is comparing apples and oranges.
All of these criticisms of video measurement on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms have some truth to them, including Nielsen’s. But it doesn’t change the fact that for growing numbers of users, particularly younger users, the video-watching experience is driven primarily by Snapchat and YouTube and Twitch and Facebook. It may not be apples to apples, but they are growing and TV is not.
That may not be what Nielsen wants to hear — or its clients, a majority of whom come from the traditional TV and TV advertising industries. But it is the truth. And those groups should remember that by the time those kinds of trends start dominating the data in analytics reports like Nielsen’s, it is usually too late.
