News & Views

Barb, the industry’s standard for understanding what people watch, today announced it has completed the increase in its nationally-representative panel of UK households from 5,150 homes to 7,000 homes.

This is the largest-ever increase in reporting sample since Barb’s launch in 1981 and is part of Barb’s multi-year contracts, which run until the end of 2029. These are key to delivering strategic developments via Barb’s principal research agency partners Kantar, Ipsos and RSMB.

This development includes new metering technology for Barb’s reporting panel, which has been expanded across 7,000 UK homes or approximately 16,000 people.

The panel expansion builds on recent developments. Barb now reports viewing of broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) services on multiple screens, non-linear programmes on TV sets, advertising/subscription video-on-demand (AVOD/SVOD) services, video-sharing platforms and dynamically-served advertising.

Caroline Baxter, Chief Operating Officer at Barb said:

“I’m passionate about high quality panels and expanding the panel is crucial because it will ensure continued high quality and true representativeness of the population.

At Barb, we know that underpinning successful, truly independent audience measurement using both panel data and big data, is the high quality and robustness of the panel itself. By investing in rigorous, interview led recruitment, we reach all parts of the population, making our panel truly representative of the UK.

This increase demonstrates Barb’s continued commitment to the UK TV and advertising industry to deliver independent quality insight that comes from panel-based measurement.”

Barb is now working to integrate these additional sources, through its new Barb Panel Plus initiative, making its dataset even more comprehensive.

Barb Panel Plus will facilitate the Barb service to incorporate return path data and first-party data from a wide range of media owners, including pure-play video on demand services, and video sharing platforms, further enhancing its data.

See Caroline Baxter’s article c/o the Media Leader for a deeper dive explaining why Barb’s panel is crucial in the age of big data here: https://the-media-leader.com/better-together-why-barbs-panel-is-crucial-in-the-age-of-big-data/

Watch below to hear about the importance of Barb completing its 7k home panel expansion, the value of combining big data and panel data, and what’s coming next from Barb Panel Plus.