Another week, another boatload of Netflix shows. Sure, they release a lot of stuff, but this week felt notable even for them, with Keep Breathing, The Most Hated Man on the Internet, Car Masters: Rust to Riches (season 4!), and Uncoupled all coming out in the same week. And that’s just the major releases! They’ll have a week coming up with another logjam between Never Have I Ever, Locke and Key, Instant Dream Home and Day Shift all coming out at the same time.
(Reminder, this week’s report covers the last week of July. Even though we get a few data points right after shows debut, I prefer to wait until we get all of Nielsen’s data. )
Time to put on my “programmer” hat again—a piece of clothing I briefly wore at a major streamer—and ask, what’s up with Netflix’s release strategy? Why is Netflix putting all of these shows out in the same week? And barely marketing some of them? And why in the summer, typically a low viewership season? And why is Apple copying Netflix, releasing three or four major shows—Loot, Black Bird, Trying, Surfaces—during TV’s biggest dead zone?
I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I can say how those shows are doing in the ratings. Instead of writing about Netflix, though, this week we’re going to check in on The Boys and Prime Video.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, TV Time trend data, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Netflix Top Ten lists, Google Trends, Samba TV, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 25th to July 31st.)
Television
The Boys third season released its last episode on 8-July, but held onto the rankings for two extra weeks, falling off the Nielsen charts this week. How did it do?
– At 112.9 million hours though 8 weeks, that’s Amazon’s single highest total hours watch for any series since March of 2020. That’s good for 6th place among all season 3 releases in my data set.
– At an 8.7 on 453K reviews, the show is an “elite” IMDb title.
– In the TV Time data set (which only goes back to September of 2021), The Boys is the fourth biggest title of all time.
Overall, The Boys season is Amazon’s best performing series to date (or at least will be until September when The Rings of Power debuts?)
Here’s how it compares to some other multi-week performers for Amazon in the Nielsen rankings:
Though The Boys really is a performer for Amazon, it still isn’t quite in the same category as some other titles, like say Netflix’s biggest show:
So yeah Amazon’s biggest show can’t compare to the top show on Netflix. (Or even Squid Game or Manifest.) But looking at the data, Prime Video may have turned things around considerably from last year. I took all the first-run shows from the first half of last year for Prime Video and compared them to the first run of the first half of this year, and see for yourself…
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers of the Streaming Ratings Report, so if you want to know if Prime Video’s ratings are up or down for the year, what the biggest flops were this week—and there were a bunch on the TV side—how well Keep Breathing, Virgin River, The GrAy Man, and Purple Hearts did, plus see a great chart from Emily Horgan on kids animated films on streaming, and more, please subscribe.
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