Nielsen is working on TV-style ratings for creators

Nielsen is working with several of the world's top creators, including MrBeast, to build a ratings system that lets advertisers compare their content directly with traditional TV.

The measurement giant wants a single standard that works across the content landscape, from broadcast and streaming to podcasts and individual social posts, giving advertisers a consistent way to value creator work alongside other media.

"If you're sitting as an advertiser or an agency and you want to place an ad dollar and you want to place it in a show or a live sporting event, how do you compare and contrast that to putting it with a creator?" Nielsen chief financial officer Jessica Holscott said, speaking on Bloomberg Businessweek.

She said Nielsen is joining forces with creators to make sure the measurement reflects their needs too.

“We're partnering with many of the top 10 creators to figure out how do we get the standard measurement because we want obviously the creators to embrace what we're building.”

Even so, Holscott acknowledged that finding a standard metric is “incredibly hard.”

Wherever the content is

Holscott said the system could eventually give individual creators their own Nielsen rating, pointing to The Gauge, its existing audience measurement product, as a possible model.

The Gauge tracks how US audiences divide their TV viewing time across broadcast, cable and streaming each month.

“Could you have a Gauge for creators where you're talking about who are the top 20 in the world, and they're on a standard measurement, and people can transact off of that?” she said.

The standard could eventually apply more broadly to content, Holscott indicated.

“Whatever content, wherever the content is, we want to be able to measure that as a standard measurement.”

She said the push forms part of Nielsen’s wider move towards becoming a “media intelligence company”, rather than solely an audience measurement business.

Asked whether measurement might lead studios to drop less valuable content, Holscott suggested it could instead inform what they choose to create and whether to partner with more creators.

“The evolution of this could be maybe they do want to partner with more creators to create certain things,” she said.