The popular industry narrative of fragmented video viewing often features visions of viewers migrating away from the television and connecting with content alone in their bedrooms, basements and man caves.
With a steady flow of viewing options being brought to market and a nearly 20% year-over-year increase in digital video growth among U.S. adults, it’s not hard to understand why this line of thinking plays out.
However, TV remains a mainstay as the primary screen for viewing long form video content. And connected devices, spurred by streaming video, have consumers connected in a familiar spot: the living room!
Earlier in the year, Roku Inc. and Nielsen announced an agreement that would enable Nielsen to measure video advertising delivered to Roku streaming players and Roku TV™ models. Early data, which leveraged both Nielsen’s representative panel as well as Roku data, used actual metered viewership habits to determine that viewers come together to co-view this content!
In fact, co-viewing among two or more viewers accounted for more than one-quarter (27%) of all viewing on a Roku device. This means that the ads served on the Roku platform had nearly one-third more audience impressions.
And the percentage of co-viewing is even higher among some genres of content.
For instance, co-viewing gave the biggest boost to audience impressions among the children’s and sporting events genres, by 38% and 28% respectively, with other genres we looked at still range at or close to 25%.
For both brand advertisers and content publishers on the Roku platform, being able to understand incremental reach and measure co-viewing consumers enables them to maximize their investments.
“Nielsen’s co-viewing measurement and insights gives marketers who serve ads on the Roku platform actionable data to better understand their collective TV audience and identify where they are potentially missing out on audience impressions,” said Megan Clarken, EVP of Global Watch Product Leadership at Nielsen. “Considering the trend in over-the-top video consumption, it’s essential for both advertisers and channel publishers to be able to rely and transact on metrics that tell the whole Total Audience story.”