Nielsen and comScore Can’t Tell You How Many People Streamed USA’s World Cup Tie With Portugal

It’s becoming clear the World Cup is a hit on US television, judging from huge ratings for Sunday night’s riveting game between the US and Portugal. But if advertisers want an impartial estimate of how many people streamed the game online, they’re out of luck.

That’s because neither comScore nor Nielsen -- the two biggest companies in third party audience research for the Web -- tracked the online audience. While both firms occasionally provide timely data on online viewership for live events (like say President Barack Obama’s inauguration), neither regularly track that sort of thing.

That highlights a reality about the Web: despite how fast online video has grown over the last few years, and all the ad dollars that are pouring into the medium, there’s no third party measure of online video audiences either in real time, or even overnight time.