Unmeasured / Issues
Every Unmeasured issue
Unmeasured is ADOTAT's weekly newsletter on TV measurement: panels, ACR, currencies and the numbers the industry trades on without checking. Each issue takes one number apart.
November 3, 2026
Nielsen Crowns YouTube the Top TV Streamer. YouTube TV Counts as Cable.
Nielsen says YouTube is the most-watched thing on American television, a record 14.2% of all TV time in July. That count leaves out YouTube TV, whose hours Nielsen has credited to broadcast and cable since February 2023, when internet-delivered linear viewing was already 5.8% of all TV.
October 27, 2026
Comscore Says Linear Holds 78% of TV Ad Time. Streaming Just Took Most of the Primetime Upfront.
Comscore's new Score Report says linear TV holds 77.7% of measured TV ad exposure time, and its release says streaming's rise is coming out of cable. Its own chart shows cable rose from 34.2% to 34.5% over the summer while broadcast fell from 44.7% to 43.2%.
October 20, 2026
VideoAmp Sells AI as Proof. An Investor Wrote Its Stake Down 80%.
VideoAmp says its AI agents will connect TV planning to proof of what worked. In the same quarter it walked away from its MRC audit, an investor cut its VideoAmp stake from $22 million to $4.4 million, about 80%.
October 14, 2026
Nielsen Sells DoubleVerify as Independence. Its Contract Lets It Refuse a Firewall.
Nielsen says buying DoubleVerify is about strengthening independence and trust in advertising. DoubleVerify's own proxy says Nielsen cut its bid twice, beat a $14.50 rival offer on speed at $13.60 a share, and wrote itself the right to refuse a firewall.
October 6, 2026
CIMM Gave TV Currency 18 Months To Get Its Act Together. Including Itself.
CIMM says its new task force will get TV measurement's existing referees working together, or disband within 18 months. What counts as progress has not been set, and Jon Watts says the task force itself will decide once its proposals are final.
September 29, 2026
The JIC Calls It "How a Number Is Made." The 672 Test Results Went To Members.
The U.S. Joint Industry Committee says its "How a Number Is Made" report shows how each certified provider turns viewing into audiences. Its re-certification ran 672 tests across more than 150 million telecast observations, and the public version contains not a single result.
September 22, 2026
Netflix Matched YouTube's 18.5 Million NFL Audience. Nielsen Counted Them Differently.
Nielsen told networks that blending its numbers with their own data for comparative press claims is "not permissible." NBC's NFL kickoff was then reported down 11%, a Nielsen-only 25.1 million set against last year's 28.3 million Nielsen-plus-Adobe blend.
September 15, 2026
Samsung Sells The Fix For 41% Duplication. Nobody Owns The Stop Button.
Samsung Ads sells Optimal Reach on a 41 percent duplication figure that it says can be fixed. That same 41 percent has appeared as households, impressions and dollars in three Samsung documents, and its $141 billion headline is just $9.3 billion times an assumed $15.16 return.
September 8, 2026
Samsung Owes $92 Million For ACR Patents Roku Beat Outright
Anonymous Media Research Holdings says a Texas jury validated its ACR patents, and a federal judge has now entered a judgment near $92.3 million against Samsung. Eleven days after Texas upheld that patent family, a California judge invalidated claims across seven of its patents and Roku won outright.
September 1, 2026
Three Companies Say ACR's Patents Are Expiring. The Oldest One Expired in 2016 and Nothing Happened.
Three companies, one of them an ACR patent holder, say the foundational ACR and watermarking patents are expiring and the datasets built on them are commoditizing. Nielsen's oldest patent, US 6,647,548, lapsed in September 2016 and no rival currency followed, while its 2008 watermarking family runs to at least October 2028.
August 25, 2026
Roku Says 87 Percent. It Doesn't Say Plus Or Minus What.
Roku and Amazon Ads say brands' other Amazon DSP channels earn 87 percent higher ROAS on days their Roku CTV campaigns run. Measured's own go-dark geo tests on another CTV platform found an effect of about 3.4 percent, and the Roku study publishes no paper, no sample size and no ROAS definition.
August 19, 2026
Nielsen Says It's More Accurate Because Its Own Model Was Skewing Older.
Nielsen says its August 31 methodology update delivers the most accurate measurement possible. Its own description of the fix says the demographic model had to be changed so it no longer skews toward older residents, one of seven changes landing at once.
August 19, 2026
Zefr Says It's MRC Accredited. For One Platform, Not Two.
Zefr, the brand-safety measurement company, says it is MRC accredited. The MRC does not accredit companies at all, only specific metrics in specific environments, so the phrase can be accurate and still tell a buyer almost nothing about what was reviewed.
August 19, 2026
VideoAmp Says $6 Billion. The Math Says $2 Billion.
VideoAmp says its platform processed $6 billion in "currency and measurement" deals last year. After two weeks of reporting, no one could explain how that number was built, and VideoAmp answered none of the 13 questions ADOTAT sent.
August 18, 2026
Nielsen Just Lost All 11 Claims to a Facial-Recognition Paper From Outside TV
Nielsen sells its image-capture audience technology as proprietary and patented. On August 14, 2026, the Federal Circuit upheld that all 11 remaining claims of its patent were obvious, beaten by an academic facial-expression paper from outside TV.