Nielsen Audio
 | |
| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Media market (research) |
| Founded | 1949, in Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Headquarters | Columbia, Maryland, U.S. |
Area served | United States |
| Key people | Sean Creamer (CEO) |
| Products | Ratings data |
| Revenue |  US$422.31 million(FY 2010) |
| US$85.11 million (FY 2010) | |
| US$53.29 million (FY 2010) | |
| Total assets | US$238.96 million (FY 2010) |
| Total equity | US$126.81 million (FY 2010) |
| Owner | The Nielsen Company |
Number of employees | 1,625 (Dec 2011) |
| Website | www |
Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron) is a consumer research company in the United States that collects listener data on radio broadcasting audiences. It was founded as the American Research Bureau in Beltsville, Maryland, by Jim Seiler in 1949 and went national by merging with Los Angeles-based Coffin, Cooper, and Clay in the early 1950s. The company's first business was the collection of broadcast television ratings.
The company changed its name to Arbitron in the mid‑1960s, the namesake of the Arbitron System, a centralized statistical computer with leased lines to television viewers' homes to monitor their activity. Deployed in New York City, it gave live ratings data on what people were watching. A reporting board lit up to indicate which homes were listening to which broadcasts. For years, Arbitron was a part of Control Data Corporation (CDC) until in 1992 it became a part of Ceridian Corporation before the company was split in 2001. Arbitron continued by renaming the old Ceridian Corporation while the spin-off firm took the Ceridian Corporation name and acted as accounting successor.
On December 18, 2012, The Nielsen Company announced that it would acquire Arbitron, its only competitor, for US$1.26 billion. The acquisition closed on September 30, 2013, and the company was re-branded as Nielsen Audio. As a condition of the deal to allow a monopoly, Nielsen was required to license its ratings data and technology to a third party for eight years.