Anurag Batra States His Views On Tv Ratings And The Usual Questions That Surrounds It

One of the youngest media moguls from India, Dr. Anurag Batra is a serial entrepreneur and a mentor to many successful entrepreneurs. Dr. Anurag Batra, Founder, exchange4media Group and Editor-in-Chief of BW Businessworld, asks pertinent questions on why the ratings issue continues to rage on. In his latest article, Anurag Batra speaks on the unanswered questions about the TV ratings.

Dr.Anurag Batra

Dr.Anurag Batra“It’s been 10 weeks since the ratings have resumed for individual news channels. Ratings and measurement are supposed to bring order and give a currency for performance and measurement for all stakeholders. However, instead, the ratings have turned out to be baffling and bemusing. The ratings in the current form leave a lot many questions unanswered rather than answering and regaining credibility”, Anurag Batra says. The current regime seems to be taking off the sheen of ratings and raises a lot of questions about the mechanism, he analyses.

The first question he answers is whether the landing pages viewership be counted as legitimate viewership and should this data be factored in while calculating ratings. In his words, “In the past, a certain broadcaster did it and the then CEO of a ratings mechanism allowed the same and the technical board of the ratings mechanism continued to allow landing page data to be featured as ratings, and allowed it as an input into ratings. I, personally, would strongly urge the stakeholders to reconsider allowing landing pages determined inputs as ‘no viewership’ or its weightage be minimised. The advertiser is paying for engaged and real viewers, not accident-bait viewers who are forced to leave impressions on a certain page”.

The second issue that worries Anurag Batra is the fact that news channel owners who rightly stayed away and criticised such practices of landing pages or other not so best practices have started embracing these practices to stay ahead. “Certain news organisations have even embraced professionals who have been mired in controversy and who they were earlier targeting for malpractices. This is very disturbing. We have to have faith and conviction in one’s own content and the process rather than hiring the same professionals that were once publicly accused of malpractices. This is double-spoken and espouses the low morality of some news media owners and their own eagerness to do well in the short term. Ideally, such professionals should have been singled out and side-lined in a formal way. We need to clean up the system”, Dr. Batra says.

The third issue he discusses is with data collection. A lot of employees of a certain data-gathering agency, which was accused of malpractices or at least the lack of any checks and tampering, have joined a new agency that is supposed to protect and gather data. This is too ironic. This shows the lack of oversight and it seems it is so easy to violate data, Dr. Anurag Batra concluded.