viewership rating: News broadcasters raise concerns over anomalies in BARC’s viewership ratings

Last week, the lobby group representing the top national news broadcasters made a presentation to BARC India, raising concerns about the sanctity of data that revealed a sudden spike in ratings for two channels, TV9 Bharatvarsh and Republic Bharat.

The NBDA stated in its presentation that these channels witnessed unusually high growth and abruptly changed rank.

ET has reviewed a copy of the presentation.

“On February 7, BARC announced the resumption of ratings from next month. Immediately from the next week, a few channels got unnaturally high growth and changed rank suddenly,” the presentation points out, naming TV9 Bharatvarsh.

It also records how, in Hindi-speaking markets, the amount of time spent viewing TV9 Bharatvarsh was unusually high when compared to others in the genre.

A query sent to TV9 Bharatvarsh for comment remained unanswered till press time, while BARC India also did not respond to ET’s email for comments.

Similarly, in terms of reach, there was an increase of 10.7 million in the rolling average reach of Republic Bharat in week 11, compared to week 10.

This implies a growth of more than 40 million over the last 4 weeks, an unprecedented gain for a channel. Email queries sent to Republic also remained unanswered. It is worth noting that the individual channel level data for the genre was released on March 17, after a gap of 17 months. Prior to that, the agency was forced to cease ratings in October 2020 after allegations that channel ratings were being influenced by a few broadcasters.

Later, BARC overhauled its systems and methodologies for the news genre. It said that following an industry-wide collaborative effort, the BARC team, along with the BARC TechComm, developed the augmented data reporting standards for the news and special interest genres that are aligned with the industry’s needs.

As per these revised standards, every week the audience estimates for these genres will only be released based on a 4-week rolling average.

While the NBDA supported that move and told BARC that it would review the new methodology and changes after three months, the industry body was forced to make a presentation within days after a few members pointed out some obvious data inconsistencies.