Whether you think of this as a "hand the rocks the craddle" type partnership (like it appears) or not..... this is actually pretty groundbreaking. ESPN has teamed with Nielsen to come up with a new way to measure across media platforms. The obvious reasoning behind this is ESPN wants show where it stands with advertisers across both TV and online content and there's no place to go better than the source...Nielsen.

Here's the breakdown of how the new measurements will work via ESPN....

* It will feature the first deployment of Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel, the new integrated sample of households being assembled by Nielsen to measure TV and Internet use within the same home.
* The initiative will also link together research data from Nielsen Mobile and other measurement sources to evaluate the cross-media usage.
* Nielsen will also provide the opportunity for several ESPN advertisers to link in and study insights about their advertising on ESPN platforms.