In 2020, Netflix lost the rights to Friends. In 2021, they lose the rights to The Office. How much do those big shows impact viewing on Netflix?
Quantifying that via Netflix’s data is fairly hard, though, since they focus overwhelmingly on their original series, as that’s the key to “building a moat” in the eyes of shareholders. Fortunately, Nielsen is now tracking consumption in the United States. Which means we have one third party firm who can help us answer the question.
Today’s visual answers this question:
How have the top four licensed shows on Netflix done this year?
Here’s the “Data Ws” to answer how I calculated this:
Who – Streaming customers
What – Total hours viewed (Nielsen million minutes divided by 60)
What (platform) – Any service
Where – In the United States
When – From week starting March 9th to Nov 2nd 2020, minus March 23rd
When (time period) – Measured Monday to Sunday.
How (did I get it) – Nielsen provided weekly top ten.
Here’s the answer in visual form:
However, we need context. As in, what does this mean? Well, to start, here’s the total viewing over the 34 weeks I have data for. And you can see what a big percentage of this top ten viewing this makes up.
To quote Shawshank, if you’ve come this far, Red, maybe you’ll go a bit further. And that is really asking this question, “Hey, EntStrategyGuy, does this matter in terms of all Netflix’s viewing? Nielsen doesn’t provide that, do they?”
No, but Netflix has!
In two different earnings reports, Netflix reported that they make up about 100 million hours of viewing per day in the US. (In the 2018 end of year report and again in 2019.) Let’s make some scenarios to cover our bases. First, we could assume Netflix has grown somewhat during Coronavirus. That’s the high case, and I’ll use Nielsen’s estimate of 44% growth from this year for that. But Netflix could have been cherry picking their 10 million hours per day number too, so I’ll use the lower estimate of 6% of all viewing Nielsen estimated in Q1. That gives us this range:
Is 6% a lot of content to lose? I’d say yes, and we don’t know how losing Friends impacted them because we don’t have the data. The good news is Grey’s Anatomy isn’t going anywhere as long as it stays on the air. The bad news is The Office is gone this month. (I’m not sure for NCIS or Criminal Minds.)
One bonus insight: Folks may be tempted to say that the higher viewership of licensed shows happens during times when content is weak. This actually isn’t true. Netflix’s highest viewership of originals actually peaked this year in March, according to Nielsen, and licensed shows saw higher numbers during that time period.
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