Nielsen Media Research will include in its national ratings shows aired by Univision Communications Inc. starting next week, a move that is expected to better measure the nation's growing Latino audience.
Nielsen has long been criticized for failing to provide a complete picture of television viewership by using a system that excludes the preferences of millions of Spanish-speaking Latinos when it calculates the size of TV audiences and the most popular shows.
Executives at Los Angeles-based Univision, controlled by billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio, anticipate that next week's change will eventually translate into tens of millions of dollars in additional ad sales. Last year, the company took in nearly $1.3 billion in TV revenue.
"Univision will finally be measured alongside its main competitors, the major English-language broadcast networks," Ray Rodriguez, Univision's president and chief operating officer, said Monday.
Since 1992, Nielsen has estimated the audiences for Spanish-language shows through a separate audience panel, releasing those numbers with little fanfare. In Nielsen's National Hispanic Television index, Univision typically delivers most of the top 20 Spanish-language shows.
Those separate ratings have led some advertisers to overlook Univision when deciding how to divvy up their dollars among the different media outlets, ad buyers say. For example, the computer program that helps most media planners come up with their budgets for ad time doesn't even include shows on Spanish-language networks. Rival Telemundo, owned by NBC Universal, also is expected to join the service.
"The fact that the research has been segregated has been an excuse for some general market advertisers to focus only on the general market networks," said Monica Gadsby, chief executive of Tapestry, a specialty unit of media buying giant Starcom MediaVest Group. "But it shouldn't be thought of that way any longer. Spanish-language media is part of the new general market."
If audiences for prime-time shows broadcast by Univision had been measured along with its English-language rivals, Univision often would be the fifth-most popular network among viewers under age 50, behind CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox Broadcasting. Among the 18-to-34-year-old crowd, Univision frequently would finish second, behind Fox.
