'Hey! Nielsen,' Why Are You Going Viral?
FIRST THERE WAS MYSPACE. THEN there was Facebook. Now the world's biggest researcher is launching "Hey! Nielsen," a new online social community where people can discuss …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen is answering with its own product a question its own trade press asked two months earlier: whether there is any point in launching your own social app at all. 'Hey! Nielsen' puts the world's dominant audience-measurement firm into the same arena as MySpace and Facebook, betting that a community built around entertainment discussion can generate data and engagement the company currently has to buy from elsewhere.
The timing matters because the platform landscape is shifting under everyone: Facebook's Platform launched on May 24 at F8 and three months in is described as innovating faster than any platform before, while Facebook is separately developing an advertising system that targets users by profile information. A researcher-turned-community-builder enters a market where the incumbents are monetizing identity, not conversation alone.
First-order effects
- Nielsen now competes directly for user attention with MySpace and Facebook rather than measuring their audiences from outside — its brand authority in ratings becomes the marketing engine for a consumer property.
- Entertainment marketers get a new Nielsen-owned venue where discussion about shows and films happens inside the measurement company's walls, tightening the loop between buzz and the numbers Nielsen sells.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's push into profile-based advertising raises the bar: any new community without comparable targeting infrastructure must compete on data quality or niche focus, pressuring 'Hey! Nielsen' to prove its entertainment-discussion angle yields something MySpace's scale cannot.
- TV networks and studios gain another channel for fan engagement — and potentially another source of audience feedback that could sit alongside, or complicate, the panels Nielsen already sells them.
Third-order effects
- If measurement firms keep building owned communities instead of only observing public ones, the industry's center of gravity shifts from sampling audiences to hosting them — a structural change in who controls entertainment-conversation data.
- A pattern where every major media company launches its own social destination risks fragmenting attention across branded walled gardens, echoing exactly the skepticism the mid-2007 debate over self-built social apps raised.
The trend: Audience measurement is expanding from observing social behavior online into owning venues where that behavior happens, as platforms like Facebook turn community data into an advertising business.