With viewership data underpinning $60 billion in television advertising, an industry behemoth is suddenly facing questions about whether it is “bringing an abacus to an AI fight.”
Pacing the stage at a conference in New York City in mid-September, VideoAmp CEO Peter Liguori made his pitch to a room full of advertising and media executives as to why they should use his company to measure television ratings instead of industry giant Nielsen. The choice, he said, was no mere matter of preference, given the landscape of plunging TV ad revenues.
“Your very survival is on stage here,” he said dramatically, displaying a picture of himself in front of a fossilized dinosaur. “You could lead the critical change—we could do it together—because if we don’t, we’re going to wind up in that museum visiting each other.”
For more than 70 years, Nielsen has held a near monopoly on tracking viewership, providing the ratings data—known in the industry as “currency”—on which more than $60 billion of TV advertising is transacted in the United States each year and billions more in content programming decisions are made. But while Nielsen still controls around 90% of the currency market, companies like VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot have made inroads.
Over the past three years, the advertising spending based on VideoAmp’s measurements has skyrocketed nearly 900%, from about $300 million per year to $3 billion, and the company, which pockets a percentage of those transactions, has seen its revenue from that business jump from $15 million to more than $100 million annually. Although VideoAmp is worth only about one-tenth of Nielsen—which was taken private for $16 billion in 2022 by a consortium led by hedge fund firm Elliott Investment Management—the Los Angeles-based startup now appears to be its first legitimate competitor.
And as its leader, Liguori has spent much of 2025 poking the bear.
The 65-year-old CEO is positioning VideoAmp, which uses large language models and machine learning to sort through data from more than 40 million households and 65 million devices, as the nimble, tech-forward alternative to an expensive, outdated and unreliable incumbent. Nielsen, Liguori says, still relies primarily on “panels”—monitoring 42,000 households that are meant to be a representative sample of U.S. homes, to allow for extrapolation across the country.
“I think what’s become evident is that [Nielsen] is bringing an abacus to an AI fight,” Liguori tells Forbes. “They’re whipping the horse to get the buggy to move forward; we’re trying to figure out how to get our Ferrari to go over 200 mph.”
A Nielsen spokesperson said in a statement that the company delivers “over 100 terabytes of data in an open, transparent ecosystem” each day and noted that it has signed new, expanded deals with some clients this year. The company’s annual revenue from its measurement services exceeds $3.5 billion, and it’s quick to tout its own evolution. For instance, the company launched an “Outcomes Marketplace” in July to assess the result of ads—beyond simply their reach—and it officially adopted a “Panel + Big Data” methodology in January, weaving in direct measurements of 45 million homes and 75 million devices.
Yet rather than silencing Nielsen’s competitors, that shift has added fuel to the fire. Media companies and advertising agencies have reported fluctuating ratings, uncharacteristic declines in viewership and a lack of clarity on the updated methodology, all of which have made forecasting difficult and led to delays in deal negotiations at the advertising upfronts in May.
The Video Advertising Bureau, which represents some 19,000 advertisers, demanded a sit-down with Nielsen in June at NBCUniversal’s boardroom in Manhattan to raise its concerns. On one side of the table sat 26 marketing and advertising executives, who asked, among other things, that panel-only measurement data be offered for one additional year to compare with the new system. Nielsen declined.
“With the panel, we didn’t really have a lot of confidence that it was truly reflecting our actual audiences, but we did understand it,” says David Porter, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of ad sales, data and insights. “With their new product, it’s obfuscated.”
Sean Cunningham, CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau, is more pointed in his critique of Nielsen, saying: “They simply respond with arrogance and indifference, frankly. There is profound frustration over the instability of the data and the unpredictability of it.”
VideoAmp entered the fray years before the Nielsen dust-up began. The company was founded in 2014 by then-23-year-old Ross McCray—later honored as a member of the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Marketing & Advertising category—to help advertisers gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns by quantifying their reach and ability to convert sales. By 2021, the company’s revenue run rate had grown to $80 million per year, and it was pivoting toward becoming a direct rival to Nielsen. That October, VideoAmp completed a $275 million fundraising round, which was followed in August 2023 by another $150 million investment at a $1.55 billion valuation.
Liguori, who had been on the company’s board of directors since 2019, was seen as the best person to spearhead the transformation given his experience both on the advertising buy side, pitching Procter & Gamble products at powerhouse agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and on the sell side, including stints as CEO of FX Networks and chairman of entertainment at Fox. In 2024, he replaced McCray as executive chairman, and he became CEO in July.
Given his background, Liguori likes to present himself as an altruistic force for the TV industry. While measurement services are evaluated on their stability and predictability—and while VideoAmp does not yet have accreditation from the Media Rating Council, an independent, not-for-profit organization that audits media research but can take years to approve new firms—VideoAmp often finds higher viewership than Nielsen.
Changing The Channel: While Nielsen still controls around 90% of the market measuring TV ratings, CEO Peter Liguori and VideoAmp have seen the advertising spending based on the startup’s data soar nearly 900% in three years.
VideoAmp
“The reliance on Nielsen is hurting the consumer” by underselling just how popular TV programs really are, Liguori says.
An example he likes to cite is CBS’s announcement in July that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would end in 2026, a cancellation that the network attributed to a $40 million deficit between the show’s budget and the advertising revenue it generated. According to VideoAmp’s data, Colbert’s audience in the 25-to-54 age demographic was 2.5 to 3 times higher than what Nielsen had measured—a difference that could have more than covered the deficit. Liguori knows that figure may be hard to believe, but he asks whether it is more logical that only 10% of Colbert’s total audience fell into that coveted age range, as Nielsen claimed, or that it could be closer to one-third, as VideoAmp estimated.
The sources of VideoAmp’s viewership data—Comcast, Dish, TiVo, Frontier and Vizio, plus a licensed panel from TVision—are almost identical to the ones claimed by Nielsen: Comcast, Dish, DirecTV, Vizio and Roku, plus its own panel. The real differentiator is in the methodology. VideoAmp believes its decade of experience as a pure-play AI technology service makes it the superior choice to sift through those billions of data points and not only count the number of people watching but determine who they are and what else they are viewing—similar to how websites track users through cookies.
Setting aside Liguori’s specific criticisms, the industry’s dissatisfaction with Nielsen is a relatively new phenomenon. For decades, the company’s ratings currency was considered something close to a public utility, and the accuracy of its measurement was universally accepted.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, Nielsen was unable to make the house calls necessary to service its tracking equipment, and about 10,000 households—roughly a quarter of its panel—went offline. The diminished panel could no longer represent national audiences, leading to viewership numbers that were dubiously low, even after the company for the first time added out-of-home viewership (tracking TV watching at, for example, bars, gyms and airports).
Sporting events in 2020 saw viewership fall precipitously—by 61% for the Stanley Cup finals and 45% for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, according to Nielsen data. The 2021 Oscars dipped 59%. Even the NFL’s regular season—a reliable ratings juggernaut—experienced a 7% drop in audience. And the declines curiously came during a stay-home order, at a time when engagement on music and video streaming platforms was exploding to never-before-seen levels.
In 2021, the Media Rating Council suspended Nielsen’s accreditation as a trustworthy measurement service. Because the MRC’s stamp of approval carries little enforceable power, advertising buyers and sellers continued to trade on Nielsen numbers uninterrupted, and the company earned back its accreditation 19 months later. But the break of trust created an opportunity for challengers.
Nielsen has mostly chosen to engage with VideoAmp and others as trespassers, rather than competitors. Over the past handful of years, Nielsen has filed several patent infringement lawsuits against TVision, HyphaMetrics, ACRCloud and VideoAmp, even filing a second suit against VideoAmp in April, a month after its first case was dismissed. When advertisers and publishers formed a Joint Industry Committee in 2023 to certify the emerging cross-platform measurement services on a quicker timeline than the MRC, Nielsen declined to participate altogether.
One person with experience negotiating Nielsen contracts on the advertising buy side compares it to “working with the mafia” because of how restrictive the company’s master service agreements can be, running 150 pages or longer. One provision even prohibits publishers and advertising agencies from producing documents that compare Nielsen’s data side-by-side with other firms’.
“If Nielsen data is so correct, what do you have to lose to let someone compare the two together?” says Frank Friedman, head of measurement at Comscore, another challenger that has gained market share in the $300 million local TV marketplace. “If it’s so perfect, it should win.”
Rivals also offer a different business model than Nielsen, which collects a large upfront service fee. The largest players in media, like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery or Paramount, pay Nielsen as much as $300 million per year as part of guaranteed multiyear contracts that include annual escalators—regardless of how ad revenues might decline.
VideoAmp, by contrast, charges a minimum guarantee of around $1 million to $3 million per year for implementation and then turns on what is essentially a meter, taking a percentage of any transactions made based on its data. Even at the levels of a major media player, Liguori estimates his service would cost about one-third what Nielsen does.
In October 2024, VideoAmp got a chance to prove it. Paramount stopped using Nielsen during a contract dispute that lasted nearly four months, with George Cheeks, at the time the media company’s co-CEO, saying Nielsen’s fee for certain networks was greater than the ad revenues the networks generated. While bargaining, the company transacted primarily using VideoAmp, a major proof of concept for the challenger.
Still, in February, Paramount signed a new multiyear agreement with Nielsen, and the company says it is “currency agnostic” going forward.
That term has become commonplace among major media companies, most of which employ Nielsen, VideoAmp and Comscore simultaneously, putting the onus on media buyers to pick the data provider they prefer.
And regardless of any public complaints about Nielsen, it’s these advertising agencies that have been resistant to change, perhaps because of the high cost of changing measurement systems or the difficulty in translating years of existing Nielsen numbers within a media mix to a new data provider. Six of the seven largest advertising holding companies have signed new, multiyear deals with Nielsen in recent years, to go with the new agreements from publishers like Paramount and WBD.
It’s fair to wonder whether the market is encouraging competition simply to extract better rates or more transparency out of Nielsen, without any intention of ever switching over, and considering Nielsen’s enormous head start, it’s difficult to see how competitors could unseat Nielsen as the market leader faster than it could close the technology gap. But as the country barrels toward a streaming future—when traditional age-sex demographics will fade away in favor of more advanced audience analytics, and companies will be able to track consumers as they move from platform to platform, the advertising holy grail—the opportunity for a technology-savvy data interpreter remains higher than ever before.
“Linear is decreasing quickly, but connected TV viewership is taking its place, and the entire television market is growing,” says Porter, the executive at Warner Bros. Discovery, which signed new deals with VideoAmp in July and Nielsen in September. “Connected TV is all based on big data and technology, and it’s that cross-platform measurement that, quite frankly, I think VideoAmp really excels at. And that’s where we’re moving toward.”