Brussels, 24 March 2025
Audience measurement is crucial for the media sector. Media service providers depend on meaningful and comprehensive measurement for several reasons. These include adequate financing through advertising, understanding their audiences, adjusting the editorial planning accordingly, demonstrating that they meet their remit by reaching all citizens (for public service media), and ultimately continuing to offer innovative and appealing services.
In Europe/the EU, the media industry has solid audience measurement systems in place. Joint Industry Committees (JICs) and Media Owner Committees (MOCs) bring together media service providers, advertisers, and agencies to oversee the development and implementation of audience measurements. They often contract third-parties (e.g. research companies) to conduct the actual measurements and regularly carry out audits. This collaborative approach ensures that methodologies and data collected are reliable, accurate, and meet relevant stakeholders’ needs, in particular in linear broadcasting, while also adapting to video-on-demand and digital in certain markets. This collaborative approach has built widespread trust, credibility, and acceptance across the industry. In markets where similar initiatives do not exist, measurements are usually carried out by research companies or the relevant stakeholders themselves in line with widely accepted industry standards.
In contrast, online platforms and certain other actors in the value chain have both the means and competitive incentives to operate outside industry frameworks. They conduct their measurements in a black box, keeping their methodologies private, and often presenting inflated numbers without independent third-party oversight and/or auditing. Furthermore, these actors use their own audience measurements to directly market advertising space and provide advertisers with the necessary planning tools. This lack of transparency, independence, and verification poses serious challenges to the media sector’s sustainability and viability.
The European Union has addressed this issue through two initiatives:
- The Digital Markets Act (DMA) introduces detailed data sharing obligations for the most powerful gatekeepers to the benefit of advertisers, publishers, and other business users, enabling them to receive and/or carry out their own measurements.
- The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) establishes key principles to ensure that all measurement systems, including proprietary ones, adhere to the same highquality standards and that media service providers can access audience measurement data from all relevant actors. However, some of the EMFA’s provisions leave room for interpretation and require clarification through Commission guidelines pursuant to Article 24(4) EMFA.
“We hereby wish to articulate our common understanding of the EMFA’s overarching principles and encourage the European Commission to develop guidelines with a view to clarifying how the EMFA’s principles should be applied in practice. The EMFA guidelines should comprehensively address audience measurement tools to support standards that uphold trusted methodologies. We stand together in the pursuit of clarity to build trust in our sector and enhance the value we deliver to our audiences”. 1
Read the Joint Position
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- Download the Joint Position
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ACT – Association of Commercial Television and Video on Demand Services in Europe www.acte.be
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EBU – European Broadcasting Union, the world’s leading alliance of public service media www.ebu.ch
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egta – the international trade body of multiplatform TV and audio businesses www.egta.com
Source – ACT (by email)