Nielsen: mSurvey Will Boost Participation Without Disrupting Ratings.

Since Nielsen’s March 4 announcement to launch its mSurvey — which aims to modernize radio measurement and complement its traditional diary service by allowing respondents to report listening electronically on their smartphones — beginning with the Spring 2026 survey starting April 2, a great deal of research has been done in preparation for the move.

“We’ve fine-tuned the instrument to focus on a mobile-first application,” Nielsen Audio Managing Director Rich Tunkel said during an April 1 RAB webinar, while reviewing testing in several markets showing young adults and Black or Hispanic households or renters were most likely to use electronic measurement, with age 45+ households less likely.

“The paper diary is not going away,” Tunkel says. “This is a paper-plus-mSurvey approach, depending on the type of household that we’re dealing with. It expands the way that we’re able to make sure we’ve got a full representative panel [and] get better response rates [and] better participation from particularly tough-to-reach demographics. What this means is we’re implementing the mSurvey with about 10% of the total intent, so 90% will still be conducted via paper and pencil, but 10% of the survey will be done via mSurvey.”

Tunkel also notes the change in recruiting to a 100% mail address-based frame, vs. the earlier mix of phone and mail. “The reason for that is the decline of land lines for identifying folks,” he says. “Using mail as a way to recruit people is a more complete mode of reaching everyone and giving them an opportunity to participate in our research.” 

How diary keepers are being incentivized is also changing. “We moved our digital incentives from paper to electronic currency in various different forms, which is immediate payback for the diary keepers,” Tunkel says. “They can choose whether it’s an Amazon gift card or other form of compensation. That’s been a real help to getting participation rates and getting people to actually fill out the surveys.”

During an earlier webinar, Nielsen said that the initial rollout will focus on households most likely to include Black, young, and/or renting residents, while traditional Diary collection continues for other homes. Nielsen plans to test additional demographic groups in future survey periods.

Before implementing mSurvey, Nielsen examined both weighted and unweighted data among key demos, looking at AQH, cume, share and TSL overall and by daypart. The bottom line? “[mSurvey] will have not have a negative impact on ratings,” Nielsen Audio Director of Diaries and Surveys Robin Gentry said during the webinar. “You’re not going to see drastic changes. What we expect when you get your spring book is that the ratings are not going to be drastically different, but we are able to better meet our respondents with the right kind of instrument [to make] it easier for them to be able to record what they’re listening to and get that information back to us.” 

How does the change in diary measurement impact over-the-air listening vs. streaming? “There was a small decline in over-the-air listening reported, but a huge increase in the amount of streaming, [which] has to do in part with how we’re measuring it,” Gentry says. “We’re doing a better job of actually capturing streams and having people identify that they were listening via the internet, so we believe that this instrument will help us moving forward to better identify those streams and be able to give credit where credit is due.”

Generally, Gentry says, comparisons across demo groups with and without mSurvey show no major changes in listening. “With the addition of mSurvey, there are some dayparts that do a little bit better, some that do slightly less, but in general, it’s very comparable between the two,” she says.

As for how the transformation in diary measurement will continue after the Spring 2026 survey, Gentry says, “It’s an exciting frontier, and we’re going to continue to tweak the methodology as we go along and improve it as we learn more about our respondents.” Adds Tunkel, “It doesn’t stop here in terms of the implementation and the iteration. We’re going to continue to refine mSurvey as an instrument to see if there’s an opportunity to roll this out to broader demos and add those demos in the future.”