BARC's 2020 promise to fix landing page ratings comes back to haunt it in Kerala HC

BARC India's latest courtroom defence of its ratings methodology is drawing renewed scrutiny from broadcasters and industry watchers, who say the rating body's own 2020 admissions are now working against it.

In a counter-affidavit filed before the Kerala High Court on July 9, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India backed the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's push to vacate an interim stay on Clause 5.4.1 of the TV Ratings Policy 2026 — the provision that excludes landing-page viewership from television ratings altogether.

BARC argued that continuing the stay "frustrates a duly notified policy framed in public interest" and that landing-page exposure cannot be treated as genuine audience choice.

But industry insiders point out that this is not the first time BARC has made this exact argument — and that is precisely the problem.

e4m on Monday reported about the counter affidavit filed by BARC in Kerala HC backing MIB’s TRP Ratings Policy 2026.

Read: Landing pages inflate ratings: BARC backs MIB in Kerala HC

A promise made in 2020 unmet

Back in September 2020, BARC had already told the industry it had solved this very issue. In a press release announcing its "Data Validation Quality Initiative," the ratings body said it was introducing an algorithm specifically to "mitigate the impact of landing page on viewership data across all genres of channels."

At the time, Dr Derrick Gray, BARC's then Chief of Measurement Science & Business Analytics, said the new method used "inferential statistics" rather than the older "symptomatic statistics" approach, and would let BARC "mitigate any landing page anomaly to better reflect viewer's choice." Then-CEO Sunil Lulla had called it a step that would "strengthen the rating currency and provide a level playing field to small and large broadcasters."

Five years on, BARC's own submission to the Kerala High Court effectively concedes that landing pages continued to distort ratings despite that 2020 fix — hence the need for a blanket exclusion under the new policy, rather than an algorithmic correction. That admission, industry executives say, raises an uncomfortable question: if the 2020 algorithm worked as promised, why is a total exclusion needed now?

"BARC told the market in 2020 that the landing page problem had been engineered away. Every ad deal, every media plan since then implicitly trusted that assurance," said a senior media buying executive on condition of anonymity.

"Now BARC itself is telling Kerala High Court that landing pages were still inflating numbers all this while. That's not a footnote — that's years of currency data broadcasters and advertisers built plans on."

"We were being shown numbers we now know were inflated"

Several broadcasters, particularly from the news genre where landing-page placement is a common practice, say the episode has dented confidence in the ratings ecosystem.

"For years, smaller and niche news channels were judged, and often mocked, on the back of numbers that BARC's own algorithm was supposedly cleaning up," said a senior executive at a news network, requesting anonymity given the ongoing litigation. "If that cleanup wasn't enough, and BARC needed a court-backed blanket ban to actually fix it, then advertisers were pricing campaigns off data that even BARC didn't fully trust."

An industry veteran who has worked closely with the Broadcasters and OTT platforms described the optics as damaging to BARC's core claim of scientific neutrality. "BARC's entire pitch to the industry is that it is the impartial keeper of 'What India Watches.' But when the regulator you're contesting in court is the same body whose own 2019 Oversight Committee flagged landing pages as a 'forced viewing' problem, and your fix from 2020 apparently didn't hold — that's a credibility issue, not just a technical one," the person said.

BARC's defence: measurement, not marketing

For its part, BARC has maintained in its Kerala High Court filing that it holds "no commercial interest" in how channels are placed on set-top boxes, and that its only stake is in ensuring ratings reflect genuine, voluntarily chosen viewership. It has argued that a categorical exclusion of landing-page viewership — rather than the kind of algorithmic adjustment it introduced in 2020 — offers "greater certainty, transparency, auditability and protection against manipulation."

BARC has also pushed back on suggestions that the matter overlaps with a separate Supreme Court case on TRAI's jurisdiction over channel placement, telling the Kerala High Court that the two disputes involve entirely different legal questions — one about measurement methodology, the other about a regulator's placement powers.

Part of the industry now wants BARC's management overhauled

The Kerala High Court disclosure is also feeding into a separate, and arguably bigger, storm brewing around BARC's leadership. Sections of the industry are now openly calling for an overhaul of BARC's management, arguing that the ratings body's own admission — that landing-page distortion persisted despite its 2020 fix — is fresh evidence of an organisation that talks reform but doesn't deliver it.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting itself is understood to have grown increasingly impatient with BARC over slow-walked reforms, according to senior industry executives, with government dissatisfaction extending well beyond the landing-page issue to include the long-pending Connected TV (CTV) measurement roadmap.

" Despite multiple advisories and discussions, BARC has drastically failed to get things right," a senior news broadcasting executive said.

Partho Dasgupta, Managing Partner at Thoth Advisors and a former BARC India CEO himself, cautioned against pinning the blame on any single individual, framing it instead as a years-long failure of collective will among stakeholders. He pointed out that the industry has long recognised the need for change but has struggled to get all parties aligned on implementing it, citing unresolved issues such as an Establishment Survey that hasn't been refreshed since 2018 and a television sample size that remains too limited for accurate regional and niche-channel measurement.

Dasgupta said the ministry appears to have taken note of these persistent gaps, which is why it moved first with the March 2026 changes to the Ratings Rules and has now escalated matters further — adding that the government's concern extends beyond the CEO's chair to the composition of BARC's board itself.

Pankaj Krishna, Founder of Chrome Data Analytics, argued that the deeper problem is structural, and that swapping out one executive risks becoming a symbolic gesture rather than a real solution. According to Krishna, what the industry actually needs is a "tamper-resistant," digitally enabled measurement framework capable of tracking fragmented viewing across TV, CTV, OTT, YouTube and mobile — and, in his words, the priority should be to "rebuild confidence," not simply restart ratings publication.

Vishal Khanna, a Connected TV specialist and founder of Sales Strategist LLP went further, arguing that the real flaw lies in BARC's ownership structure itself — a 60:20:20 shareholding split between the Indian Broadcasting and Digital Foundation (IBDF), the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI). He argued that a change of management wouldn't fix how BARC functions, since the broadcasters who own the body are the same ones whose channels get rated by it — calling it, pointedly, a system where "the exam is written, marked and owned by the students." He described the current moment as a "trust architecture crisis" and noted that internationally, audience measurement is typically industry-led without this level of government intervention.

Taken together with the Kerala High Court affidavit, industry watchers say the landing-page episode has become a flashpoint that crystallises the broader case being made against BARC's current leadership and governance model — that a body which spent five years insisting a problem was fixed, only to now argue in court that it wasn't, cannot simply be trusted to self-correct without structural change.

Advertisers want answers, not just fixes

Even as the legal arguments play out, some in the advertising fraternity say the bigger cost may be reputational.

"Every time BARC announces a 'fix,' the market treats it as gospel and moves on. This time, the fix itself is being litigated as insufficient," said a media planning head at a large advertising agency, speaking anonymously. "The real question the industry wants answered isn't just whether the new policy will finally solve the landing page issue — it's how much ad spend over the last five years was allocated based on ratings BARC now effectively admits were still exaggerated."

For now, all eyes are on the Kerala High Court, which has posted the matter for further hearing on July 21. But the fallout is no longer confined to the courtroom. Between the ministry's own reported frustration with the pace of reform and an industry now questioning whether a leadership or governance change is overdue, BARC finds itself fighting on two fronts at once — defending a policy it says is necessary, while facing a credibility challenge over why it took a court case to make an admission it could have acted on years earlier.

Whether the court accepts BARC's argument that a blanket exclusion is the only credible fix, the episode has already reopened a debate the industry thought had been settled back in 2020: can broadcasters and advertisers fully trust the currency that decides where India's ad money goes — and, increasingly, can they trust the people and structure entrusted to run it?