When we use the term “paper and pencil,” it’s usually derogatory. Next month, Nielsen Audio will make the big step into the world of online data collection for the venerable diary service with the introduction of mSurvey. Yes, the online diary will debut in the Spring 2026 survey for a limited part of the sample, meaning some percentage of diary respondents will not have to find a pen to fill out a paper Nielsen diary.
It’s easy to take potshots at Nielsen Audio for waiting this long. You can imagine people asking if the company had heard about this new technology called the internet. I’m no apologist for Nielsen Audio, but I’m not willing to point fingers at them in this instance.
It helps that I’m old and can bring up history in this column. Arbitron implemented an online diary in the Winter 2007 survey period. It was pulled because return rates dropped. Another attempt to design an online diary was made in the early teens with something called Project Leapfrog. Per the old saying, that frog was being boiled before it figured out that it couldn’t leap. Much like the Stalin era, when Soviet officials who “disappeared” were airbrushed from photos, Leapfrog disappeared as well and was never spoken of again. Bet you never expected to read an analogy involving Joseph Stalin and radio ratings.
Nielsen finally came around to a reasonable online diary system with the new mSurvey. Perhaps the company should have started the initiative after Leapfrog was killed off, but at least we’re here. The company has announced that the first use of the instrument will begin shortly in the Spring 2026 survey.
Based on what Nielsen has shown, the mSurvey works best on a smartphone, which makes sense in 2026. The online diary asks the same questions as the paper diary and has a couple of features that paper can’t provide. For example, the mSurvey will not let you report listening for a day in the future. A paper diary keeper can fill in the diary any time they please.
The mSurvey has an “other” category. For a long time, the paper diary has included instructions to include internet listening to broadcast radio stations and satellite listening. If you didn’t know, listening to SiriusXM counts in PUR but is not reported — either at an aggregate level or by channel — regardless of whether the listening meets minimum reporting standards. However, the paper diary only offers “AM” and “FM” categories. This is another positive change. On the negative side, the mSurvey does away with the examples of how to enter listening that exist in the paper diary.
Nielsen has shown some results from its testing and announced plans to go ahead with mSurvey for specific types of households. The households are:
- Black households without the presence of a 55+
- Non-Hispanic households without the presence of a 55+
- Renter households without the presence of a 55+
The reasoning is that testing showed that for those groups, “ratings are comparable or higher for all key buying demos.” Young Hispanic households without a 55+ showed “generally comparable” ratings in the test markets except for Fresno. For the other households, the problem was that ratings were lower for people 45+.
The open secret in the diary service is the vertical “line.” In other words, some diary keepers write down 8AM and draw a line to 5PM. Edit rules say that’s nine hours of listening, and in fact, the instructions show how to use the “line.” The mSurvey doesn’t have a line, but you can enter 8:00AM as a start time and 5:00PM as an end time. The end result is the same.
So far, the mSurvey looks good, but my concerns center around disclosure. The call with NAB’s COLRAM committee on March 2 showed only “weighted” results, where the mSurveys were rolled up with paper diaries. The fact that the mSurvey results alone were not reported suggests that something isn’t quite as positive as Nielsen suggests. In the past, reporting the results with the test group alone would be standard practice.
The reason is probably that unless mSurvey was a complete failure, Nielsen planned to go ahead with implementation. An online diary must be less expensive than mailing paper diaries, which means “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” even if “full speed ahead” in the audience measurement world is slow.
Overall, mSurvey is a necessary change and looks positive. They’ll keep working at it to determine how to spread the change to other demos, but a little more openness would be appreciated. Let your clients and the industry make up their own minds about the effect of this major methodological change.
Let’s meet again next week.
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