| The poorly placed statement in the article about VZs NYC franchise is confusing the issue. The NY market includes all the subscribers in VHO5 (ie, LI, Westchester, Rockland) and all of those in the NY DMA portion of VHO7 (Northern NJ).
The problem that the claimant has is that VZ is providing pending install numbers (ie, orders taken) and counting them as active subs. Without knowing the numbers, the claimant's premise - that the numbers provided do not equate with the numbers of new subs added - could possibly be explained by factoring in those dropping the service. But it could be that VZ is simply trying to pump the numbers up.
Advertising rates are set on historical data about viewership - when they do the sweeps, they don't take the measurements and then say, the national growth rate for the population is X, so we'll add that to the measured viewership.
In the programming contracts, which also require accurate sub counts, there are formulas: take the total subscribers at the first and last day of the month, add them together, and divide by 2.
That approach should apply whether you are determining the number of viewers for licensing fees, or for advertising rates.
VZ outsources all of the advertising sales to a third party, who should know exactly how to count eyeballs. It is interesting that they were not mentioned in the excerpts I saw. |
