Oct 16, 2026note

Nielsen’s “The Gauge” bugs me

They’ve been producing a report called “The Gauge” for a while and this chart has always bugged me:

Nielsen’s The Gauge donut chart: Streaming 49.0%, Broadcast 19.5%, Cable 18.7%, Other 12.8%, with streaming broken out by service (YouTube 14.2%, Netflix 7.8%, Disney 4.7%, Prime Video 4.2%, and others)

You’ve got this mix of distribution and channel that doesn’t give you an accurate picture of either. Back in February of 2023 they changed the methodology to put vMVPD viewership (YouTubeTV, Hulu Live, etc) into Broadcast and Cable instead of Streaming. I can understand why they did that, but I think it’s still misleading. vMVPDs make up ~33% of “cable subscriptions” which is also how most people are watching broadcast. The core issue is that they’re mixing two dimensions of one metric in a single chart.