I’ve just come from 25 hours of reflection, repentence and starvation where, among other things, I at least offered to try and resolve to be less judgmental and more forgiving of those who is some way cross or disturb us with their behavior. Were this musing to occur on another day, I might be much snarkier and harsher about how I felt about THE ANKLER’s Sean McNulty and his attempt to take a deep dive into a whole bunch of Nielsen data ,which a goodly amount of yesterday’s WAKEUP newsletter was devoted to.
Like his fellow ANKLERs, McNulty has an extremely opinionated and often heavyhanded view of what, how and why media companies do and the results–or havoc–that often ensues from it. He’s a regular contributor to their weekly podcast that I’m an avid listener and actually a subscriber to, so I have a bit more insight into the way they think than many of their less tech-savvy competitors primarily from the Penske-verse, the former employer of a goodly amount of said peers. Unlike them, McNulty actually has a significant background in the corporate world, spending a bit more than 15 years as an HBO marketing and digital media executive with an impressive track record of accomplishments before he segued into more creative pursuits. He’s also apparently an unapologetic fan of underachieving New York sports teams, So I suppose we’re more kindred spirits than not.
But while I often enjoy the flippant and frequently chiding style that tends to define some newer and bolder entertainment news platforms like the ANKLER, I get a bit prickly and arguably defensive when they delve into areas that aren’t their particular sweet spot and offer viewpoints that are at best half-baked and, in this case, I’d offer missed the point entirely. And such was the case with his reaction to a data dump that Nielsen pooped out earlier this week, clearly with the hopes of attracting press attention. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s veteran ratings guru Rick Porter took the more traditional and arguably pablumy approach with what he shared on Wednesday:
As Nielsen rolls out its updated ratings that crunch viewing data from millions of devices alongside its traditional sampling method, the company is also showcasing that data in a series of new reports.
The ratings service began implementing its “big data plus panel” ratings for live telecasts on Sept. 1 and for all linear programming with the official start of the 2025-26 TV season on Sept. 22. With the first week of the season now complete, the company issued weekly numbers that are a bit different than what it has offered up in the past. There are lists of the most watched broadcast and cable programs, as usual, but also a ranking just of the top 25 live sports programs and, most intriguing, what Nielsen is calling its “total scheduled programming chart.” That lists the top 250 shows of the week regardless of time of day (primetime, daytime and late night are all together) or origin — broadcast, cable, and even live streaming.
Porter devoted the balance of his piece to what his subhead trumpeted as click-worthy: how ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!,’ a streaming NFL game and network evening newscasts joined the top 25 shows of the week. In a landscape where now the majority of multiplatform viewing occurs at some point other than the initial day and date of airing (save, of course, for live news and sports), this was a necessary and defendable evolution that may have been “man bites dog” to a more casual observer than it actually was.
McNulty chose to dive much deeper and head-first into the brink, dropping a lot more words–mostly words of surprise and lament–and a whole bunch of figures into his noticeably darker take:
Cable TV 2025 is a sad, sad place
The folks at NIELSEN are releasing some new weekly reports with their new BIG DATA + PANEL metrics 
.
And, ok, yes — this isn’t breaking news — but looking at where things stand for the average linear TV audiences on cable TV networks in the final week of September 2025 . . . wow.
The cable bundle has really meaningfully become, as predicted, just sports and news.
More accurately — the cable TV bundle is just ESPN, 3 cable news networks and one lifestyle network on a given evening.
Elsewhere, primetime audience viewership numbers are more brutal than I expected — across the board.
McNulty then cited 16 specific examples from last week to back up that conclusion, from which he developed a whole bunch of tsk-tsk-y thoughts such as these:
— In a world with about 60M folks subscribed to / getting most name-brand cable TV networks as part of the TV bundles they pay for each month — only 1 general entertainment network had over 400k viewers on a given night . . . and 4 general entertainment cable TV networks had more than 350k viewers total during the last week of September.
— Kinda puts the notion of an affiliate agreement standoff in a new light — and why CHARTER felt so confident standing up to DISNEY 2 years ago (when presumably these numbers were not even this bad).
— It’s kind of 
to think about the billions of dollars in revenue and profitability these non-news and ESPN networks still generate each quarter. Ad buying habits are incredibly hard to break.
— Finally, anyone wanna guess what all of these numbers look like in 2 more years?
Well, good sir, in the same spirit, you might have wanted to at least have looked back merely one year for some sort of context for those numbers that as much as it did. I did, and while it’s admittedly a bit of apples and oranges when one looks at one week versus 52, it does illustrate what I’d argue is the bigger takeaway: that after years of anticipation and hype that Nielsen’s expanded and enhanced Big Data + Panel was supposed to provide to a desperate and starving industry, we still saw a plethora of double-digit percentage declines, with the only exceptions being buttressed by live sports (or, in the case of FS1 last week which McNulty took particular note , lack thereof).
That 16-network subset which McNulty compiled was collectively off -23.2% vs. calendar year 2024. Anyone wanna guess what those numbers looked like without that ballyhooed Big Data?
Actually, had McNulty bothered to run the full brunt of what I know he received and seemed determined to parse and piecemeal by someone who has spent more time with these things than apparently he has, none of us would have to guess. We would have done the heavy lifting to folks like him. Just like I used to for many of those that preceded him.
Along with many of my contemporaries, I took particular pride and devoted a lot of time and effort to helping make journalists clearer on ratings and research when it was germane to a story. We know Nielsen reports are by design overwhelming and exhaustive and therefore boring as whatnot. We also follow this beat a lot closer to help those better determine what actually is noteworthy.
I really wish that such a relationship between the C-Suite and trade press still existed. It sure seems like there are fewer and fewer qualified and motivated folks on the supply side than there used to be. It especially seems like absolute nothing like that occurred in this case. It’s understandable why folks like McNulty wouldn’t immediately be inclined to include them in their reporting as a resource, quotable or otherwise. It seems to me he wanted to be a student but didn’t have access to a teacher sufficiently capable of providing a lesson. For that, I give an incomplete.
If I wasn’t still basking in what’s left of the afterglow of a Day of Atonement, I’d probably be a lot more biting and bitter about this, as I admittedly tend to be. But hey, Sean, you got me on what one of my better days. So I’ll take you up on your invite that your LinkedIn provided to directly send this to you and merely ask that the next time you want to devote your time and space to something research-related you might think of somehow throwing a soupbone to some of us who desperately wish we still could?
Maybe give us a shoutout so perhaps our meager attempts at our own career pivots could possibly be amplified enough to afford something akin to the Jersey Shore lifestyle you can’t help but reference in almost every podcast I’ve heard you on? In my case, we’re simply talking about having a bank account for 30 days a month that doesn’t plunge into the negative as it did for approximately one-third of the one just completed.
We’re here and ready to help, Sean. Perhaps you might be inclined to revisit this space at some point before the two-year followup you flippantly referenced? Know that we’re here. But I won’t hold my breath.
Until next time…