Nielsen Media drops Boston from Top 5 media markets
The Boston Herald reports that Boston has fallen from fifth to seventh on Nielsen Media’s list of television markets, partly because of Boston’s stagnating population and partly because of growing populations in Dallas-Ft. Worth and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, the two markets that have overtaken the Hub of the Universe.
Some in Boston are displeased and would like to shoot the messenger (well, the measurer, I guess):
Some advertising executives are questioning Nielsen’s methodology, because of the huge increase in TV homes in both the San Francisco and Dallas markets.
“They both went up really high, and we’re actually questioning Nielsen why that happened. The numbers sound way too high,” said Karen Agresti, senior vice president with Boston ad agency Hill Holliday.
Unfortunately for Ms. Agresti, the magnitude of market-size change is not out of the ordinary for Nielsen Media market-size estmates for the three markets in question over the past several years, as this chart illustrates:
| Changes in television market size. 01-02: Number of television households in the 2001-2002 season. The second 06-07 is the number of television households in each market in 2006-2007. Other years indicate the change (in thousands) from previous season. | |||||||
| 01-02 | 02-03 | 03-04 | 04-05 | 05-06 | 06-07 | 06-07 | |
| Boston | 2,315,700 | +37.8 | +38.3 | 0.0 | -16.5 | -3.3 | 2,372,030 |
| Dallas | 2,201,170 | -5.6 | +60.4 | +36.8 | +43.4 | +42.3 | 2,378,660 |
| SF | 2,426,010 | +10.2 | +4.7 | -81.0 | -4.1 | +28 | 2,383,570 |
In fact, as you might deduce from the table above, Boston snatched the fifth place from San Francisco after the latter was devastated by the implosion of the dotcom bubble.
Boston’s demotion presumably means Boston Globe has to change its Why Buy Boston self-promotional web site. Or it could just abandon the site the way the company abandoned bostonglobe.com and the seriously dated and misleading market data it used to publish there.
