Measuring Household Reach to Understand Password Sharing

Publisher profile

• U.S.-based streaming provider
• Subscription model with some free, ad-supported options
• Thousands of on-demand shows and live streaming content

Challenges

The publisher wanted a strong understanding of the size of their audience to evaluate content decisions, support ad sales, and evaluate churn. The publisher suspected that a number of their customers were sharing passwords, so simply knowing their subscriber number was under-counting their household reach. They needed support to better measure the actual number of households using their streaming service. It was necessary to find a solution that could isolate true household reach.

Solution

With Conviva, the census, continuous measurement and engagement platform for streaming media, the publisher was able to use the Stream ID household data  to understand the true size of this customer’s audience in terms of household reach.

Leveraging our proprietary algorithm that considers several different identifiers as well as subscriber data, we were able to map viewing sessions associated with residential IPs to a household. The publisher was then able to get a proper understanding of how many different households were using their streaming platform.

Benefits

This knowledge gave the provider a better understanding of their total reach for advertisers and a more accurate picture of content consumption.

Additionally, the publisher was now able to understand which accounts were sharing passwords and could build capabilities to gate the number of households using an account at once. They could also market an upsell option to these accounts to allow for additional households.

Results