A collection of private equity firms are in talks to buy Nielsen Holdings, the company known for TV ratings measurement, for around $15 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
If the deal happens – and the WSJ reported it could still fall through – the hefty sum would include Nielsen’s reported debt of over $5 billion.
The firms involved in the potential buy include Elliott Management Group, which had an 8% stake in Nielsen in 2018, and 13% by 2020. In 2018, they also were encouraging the company to sell, per the WSJ.
Investors acquired the Dutch media company that owned Nielsen for $9.6 billion in 2006.
The report comes just a few months after the December news that Nielsen had been undercounting out-of-home viewers since Sept. 2020. In January though, the Video Advertising Bureau, which represents the major TV networks, said the undercounting wasn’t “minimal,” as had been suggested.
In VAB’s 22-page report, the measurement undercount was expected to cost $700 million worth of ad time that the networks were not able to sell to marketers.
“The only thing worse than Nielsen’s admitted error of 65 consecutive weeks of undercounting TV viewing was their claim of ‘no impact to minimal impact’ from that blunder. We now know that error is tracking towards 60 billion lost TV impressions and $700 million worth of TV ads that marketers couldn’t buy because of Nielsen’s second admitted case of 2020-2021 pervasive undercounting,” Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of VAB, said at the time.
In a statement to TheWrap in January, Nielsen responded: “We reviewed the information shared by the VAB today, and while we acknowledge the understatement in a portion of our National out-of-home audiences, we stand by our prior statements that the magnitude of the issue was very small for the majority of telecasts.”
Just last year, Netflix upped their own role in their program watching analytics. While it takes weeks for Nielsen ratings over streaming to come out, Netflix launched its own weekly Top 10 list in November of last year.
Following news of the talks, shares of Nielsen Holdings spiked, closing at $22.85 on Monday.
TheWrap has reached out to Elliott Management Group for comment.
