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Nielsen YouTube Partner Reporting

By The YouTube Team

Demonstrating traffic and audience reach is an important part of growing your channel on YouTube. Last year we announced that providers would begin to include viewership data across YouTube partners, and now Nielsen’s VideoCensus tool will also report on YouTube partner channel viewership using their hybrid audience measurement methodology. VideoCensus subscribers will now be able to generate streaming audience metrics and demographic compositions on YouTube partners.

To help you understand how Nielsen arrives at their viewership numbers for your channel, we’ve invited Nielsen’s Marco Parente, Product Director, Internet Streaming, to walk you through their research and methodology:

With consumers increasingly turning to multiple devices to watch their favorite video content, we understand the importance of providing our clients the full view of how consumers engage—no matter the platform. We are excited to work with YouTube on bringing a deeper level of YouTube Partner content reporting to Nielsen clients globally.

Our Nielsen VideoCensus online measurement technology delivers detailed information about audience consumption of video streaming in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Combining patented panel and census technologies, Nielsen VideoCensus employs a user-centric hybrid audience measurement methodology providing an end-to-end accounting of audience size, demographic composition, engagement and competitive activity of streaming media.

There may be times when Nielsen’s data for video views differs from what you see in your YouTube account. This could happen because Nielsen’s data:

- Uses different mechanisms than YouTube to filter out non-human traffic, spider/bot views, and fraud attempts.
-Is currently only presented for one country at a time, whereas YouTube’s data represents all worldwide viewing.
- Does not include views of partners’ claimed UGC content, whereas YouTube data may include these in some cases.
- Currently includes only some views on non-desktop devices such as mobile.


To ensure you have third-party attribution reporting on your channel, follow these steps in the Help Center.

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