Is the Hispanic Streaming Audience Tiny?
Or does the media industry have a major research problem?
One of my favorite nerd reports to check out each month is The Gauge from Nielsen, which breaks down the streaming wars by total viewership share in the US. The top usually doesn’t change - it’s consistently dominated by Netflix and YouTube - but it’s the bottom that is most interesting. One month Tubi cracks the 1% minimum threshold, next it’s Pluto, recently Peacock finally made its debut.
Vix is never anywhere to be found.
You may be asking - what is Vix? That may be because you don’t speak Spanish, or don’t live in New York or Los Angeles, where it’s been advertised prominently since launching last year around this time. Vix and Vix+ are TelevisaUnivision’s entry in the Streaming Wars, and in February the company announced that Vix had reached 25 million mostly free users.
Yet oddly, Vix shows never show up in Nielsen’s top ten streaming shows ranking, which lately has featured the likes for Netflix shows like “You” or “Wednesday,” or Disney+’s “The Mandalorian.“
ComScore publishes similar data. It’s top streaming services include Hulu and HBO Max (but not Vix), and its top 10 streaming shows ranker list hits like “The Last of Us” and “Bridgerton.” But nothing from Univision or its Spanish language competitor Telemundo, which reported that 30% of its record World Cup audience was found on streaming platforms last December.
This seems pretty off to me, considering just how big, fast-growing, and young the US Hispanic audience tends to be.
So what’s going on here?
Is Vix just too new to show up in these metrics?
In Telemundo’s case, is streaming viewership just being split between its own properties and Peacock?
Is the 25 million audience number Univision reported inflated because it’s global?
Is Vix simply not working? One buyer said that the recent Vix monthly audience numbers were much lower than 25 million the company reported.
Or, is the US Hispanic audience a laggard when it comes to shifting TV viewing to streaming?
Or, are US Hispanics simply watching lots of English-language shows on streaming platforms?
Or the big scary question - do the existing metrics companies suck at tracking US Hispanic consumers?
I think it’s a tough, but pretty important question, considering the direction US demographics are headed. Some theoretical answers:
Spanish-language shows and services are really small compared to relative to a Netflix, Disney+ or Tubi. In other words, Hispanic viewers like “Love is Blind” too. To be fair, Paramount+ -home of the Yellowstone Universe - doesn’t even reach the 1% threshold in Nielsen’s The Gauge. Plus streaming overall just recently got in range of cable and broadcast TV.
Spanish language content can be found on Pluto, Tubi and YouTube. Don’t sleep on Vevo, which says it reaches 30.1 million Hispanic Americans each month - basically half the Hispanic American population.
There is a unique consumption pattern that is hard to track. ”Hispanic populations overwhelmingly use mobile platforms for media consumption these days – and existing media research companies are not great at capturing mobile media usage much less combining it with TV or other distribution platform audiences,” RPA’s Lisa Herdman SVP, Executive Director Strategic Investment, told me. “Lots of cross-platform media measurement progress needs to be made for proper reporting of viewer behaviors for multicultural audiences of all kinds, but especially Hispanic audiences & users of media in languages other than English.”
In fact, last summer, Radha Subramanyam, President and Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS told me on my podcast that existing media research severely undercounts Hispanic households, and particularly those who access TV over the air.
To be sure, I don’t know the answer. It does seem weird that in a country where Bad Bunny rules the charts that we don’t have a single Spanish language show popping on streaming platforms. Whatever the cause, this appears to be a rather serious issue to solve for as we head into the upfront/Newfront season. Because not only do we constantly hear that CTV pricing is high, and inventory is scarce - but brands desperately need to figure how to cater to this young and expanding consumer population.
Now that Nielsen has been reaccredited, I would think that media buying agencies would start to apply pressure regarding the tracking of these audiences. Until then, the Hispanic Streaming Audience will be tough to gauge.