Over the past two weeks, Variety and The Wall Street Journal have reported that Nielsen’s popular “The Gauge” indicator may be providing an inaccurate view of the video market. Previously, the company obtained estimates exclusively from its own panels of volunteers.
As journalist Patrick Coffee explained, in recent months, Nielsen began warning its clients that “its broadcast and cable TV numbers could see an increase in February, after the company began using a study from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) to base its estimates on the demographic groups in American households and the technologies they use to watch TV.”
Because of this, the traditional The Gauge, which contains February measurements, had not yet been published at the time of writing this column.
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When it is released, according to data collected by Coffee, it will show that streaming represented 41.9% of TV viewing time in the US in February, compared to 47.4% for so-called linear TV.
As analyst Andrew A. Rose recalled,, It’s a reversal from Nielsen’s most recent monthly report, which indicated that television viewership in January was made up of 47% streaming and 42.7% linear TV, as well as Nielsen’s announcement last year that streaming had surpassed broadcast and cable TV viewership in May for the first time.
Most advertising on broadcast TV and cable channels in the US is traded based on Nielsen estimates. Hernan Lopez uses examples from Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which together sold US$13.4 billion in advertising across broadcast and cable TV channels in 2025, globally.
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Assuming two-thirds of that is directly or indirectly impacted by Nielsen audience estimates, a 10% increase in those estimates could represent about $890 million per year in additional high-margin revenue for the two companies combined.
However, the analyst makes an important caveat: in streaming, the effect is not the same. Not only does advertising represent a smaller share of revenue, but many of these ads are traded on proprietary data, not Nielsen.
“An important exception is sporting events, where out-of-home audience estimates help streamers in negotiations,” highlights Lopez.
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The collapse of the traditional media value chain
In this context, Rose draws attention to a critical point: the message that emerges from market signals is that the traditional media value chain (producing content, attracting audiences, selling advertising and measuring with Nielsen) is collapsing at each stage.
The expert argues that the video market has become a zero-sum game, with an increasingly lower ceiling. Streaming is forcing more consumers into cheaper, ad-supported plans, but only recouping two-thirds of linear TV’s lost ad revenue, according to MoffettNathanson research.
“The remainder of this advertising revenue is migrating to YouTube and other digital platforms”, he warns.
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In January, Rose wrote an essay in which he argued that the $1 trillion advertising market predicted for 2026 seemed like good news for storytellers. But, upon deepening the analysis, he concludes that this is not the case.
Backed by insights from a CES panel in Las Vegas on “Balancing AI Ad Innovation and Intellectual Property Protection,” Rose explains that the infrastructure being built (scene-level targeting, AI production tools, programmatic efficiency) extracts value from creators’ content without distributing it back to them.
Platforms and advertisers put up barriers to access, while storytellers are creating narratives that platforms monetize.
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“That’s always been YouTube’s business model,” he recalls. Last week, why the actual distribution of attention is increasingly concentrated: 4% of YouTube videos account for 94% of views.
The data fight will not save the upfronts
According to Rose, streaming platforms are pressuring Nielsen to postpone the report due to the new methodology based on ARF. The annual events to present new programming begin soon, but the sector does not have reliable data on where the public actually consumes content.
The analyst provokes the market by leaving two questions. First, what will happen to advertising investments in traditional media?
Both linear TV (-3.3%) and broadcast TV (-2.5%) saw advance ad spending decline last year, while streaming soared (13.9%). Regardless of what Nielsen’s new indicator says about streaming, Rose highlights that YouTube is positioned to capture even more customers.
Second, if brands reduce spending on linear TV and streaming, will those resources go toward creating original intellectual property?
If this happens, the movement will be more than a migration of investments between traditional channels and streaming platforms or YouTube.
For Rose, this is a possible rupture in the traditional advertising value chain, with brands beginning to structure their own entertainment infrastructure.
In the end, upfronts can no longer be a point of sale within an old system, while creating their own distribution and monetization paths.
