BARC India to resume publishing of news genre viewership data starting March 17

The first set of data will be effective week 10 of 2022 (March 5-11).

The announcement came almost a month after the information and broadcasting ministry’s directive to the ratings body to “immediately release” TV viewership ratings for news channels, which were suspended since October 2020.

“BARC India and the industry at large, welcomes the MIB’s directive to resume the release of data for individual news channels. The data will be released as per the augmented data reporting standards for news and special interest genres,” BARC said in a statement.

The agency also said that it is currently working towards ensuring the seamless release of individual news channel data and has communicated the same to its clients and stakeholders.

The augmented standards entail the reporting of audience estimates for news and special interest genre channels on a 4-week rolling average basis, which would be released regularly every week along with the estimates for all other channels.

All viewership data will be published on the same platform that all our subscribers use.

BARC said that in the weeks leading up to the resumption of news channels ratings, the agency will be reaching out to its constituents to inform and educate them about the details of the augmented data reporting standards.

“With the active support of the Technical Committee members, all our stakeholders and industry experts, we believe we have a statistically sound and effective solution which helps augment the robustness of the data and reporting, which we had set out to do. This would be another significant step taken by BARC India to ensure a strong currency for advertisers and media organisations,” BARC said.

BARC had stopped the news genre ratings pending an investigation into allegations of rigging by some news channels.

The decision was taken in the wake of the alleged manipulation of viewership data by a few broadcasters in connivance with former top management of BARC. The review was supposed to take 8-12 weeks and was aimed at “improving” the statistical robustness and “significantly hampering” the potential attempts of infiltrating panel homes.

At that time, the News Broadcasters Association —now rechristened as News Broadcasters and & Digital Association (NBDA) — had conveyed to BARC that ratings should continue to be suspended considering the revelations (alleged TRP manipulation scam) which show the arbitrary nature of functioning at BARC.