Who Owns Nielsen?

Arthur C. Nielsen Sr. founded the A.C. Nielsen Company in Chicago in 1923, initially measuring what stores sold and effectively inventing the market share concept. His firm moved into media in the 1930s, measuring radio audiences, then built the household meters that produced national television ratings from the 1950s onward.

The Nielsen ratings became the settlement currency for American television: networks, advertisers, and agencies priced tens of billions in annual ad spending on its household data. For most of the 20th century the brand name was synonymous with TV measurement itself.

Ownership cycled repeatedly. Dun & Bradstreet acquired the company in 1984, it later listed in the Netherlands, a private equity consortium took it private in 2006, and it returned to the NYSE in 2011 as NLSN. Streaming then forced the biggest change in company history: under activist pressure it sold NielsenIQ to Advent for $2.7 billion in 2020 and accepted the Elliott-Brookfield take-private in 2022.

The current chapter is about survival of its currency status. Nielsen lost Media Rating Council accreditation for national TV in 2021 after pandemic panel problems, regained it in 2022, and now sells Nielsen ONE, a cross-platform product combining its panels with Big Data device measurement, as networks and agencies experiment with rival currencies.