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I have about a dozen different competing ideas to introduce this article, but I’ll just go with this one:
Was the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight bigger than the Super Bowl?
Of course, like any question, it depends what you mean. Do we mean in America? Or total viewers globally? Or just on streaming? Or just “big” as in cultural significance? For example, the biggest tech writer in the game, Ben Thompson, described it as “Netflix’s biggest event ever.” So was it?
When it comes to most news articles—and, sadly, even a lot of commentary articles by some very smart folks—those distinctions matter less than the hype itself. It’s very easy to just call something the biggest and the most groundbreaking; it’s much harder (and less viral) to wade through all the data for the more nuanced truth.
But that’s what we’re going to do today. This is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve seen a lot of dicey comparisons between a digital viewership and traditional metrics. (The podcast election was the other one.)
And of course, I went long. This was supposed to be a short mini-dive included in the Streaming Ratings Report; now it’s a long article (even for me) but this topic feels more than worth the time. The plan is to dig into this very important sporting event for Netflix, then finish the Streaming Ratings Report for the week of 11-Nov on Friday.
So let’s dive in.
BLUF
First, I’m going to offer a “Bottom Line, Up Front” summary, then put most of the details behind a paywall.
- The Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight is one of the biggest TV shows, specials or films in Netflix’s history.
- But is it number one? It probably garnered the biggest single day of viewership, but not the biggest over a week or more of viewership. (That title still belongs to Squid Game, Stranger Things, or Wednesday.)
- The Super Bowl was almost certainly bigger than this fight in America, and maybe globally. The Olympics also likely bested it in 2024.
- This was probably the “most streamed live event” in streaming history, especially globally. Most other big events are dualcast on broadcast, cable and streaming, so this wins by default compared to other Netflix live events.
- Live TV will be an increasingly important part of Netflix’s content and revenue plans. (But not in the way you’d think.)
- I don’t know how replicable this live one-off events strategy will be in the long run. It took four attempts to have a hit, and there aren’t obvious future events of this magnitude. The NFL on Christmas Day games will tell us a lot.
- Meanwhile, other sporting events and leagues will demand high prices to come to Netflix. (The “curse of the mogul” applies to sports leagues too.)
Three Key Data Lessons
Over the last month, I’ve actually had a bunch of folks send me examples of bad coverage of the Tyson/Paul fight. That happens occasionally, but not this much.
These readers likely recognized three big data problems that leapt out of the coverage. And yeah, I know a lot of folks want me to just get to the data (including at least two data sources that I didn’t see other sites covering) along with the usual assortment of charts, but I want to start with these problems, since they put things into context.
Data Lesson One: Make Things “Apples-to-Apples”.
There are two ways this applies to the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight:
- First, don’t compare US numbers to global numbers. That is the WORST non-apples-to-apples comparison one can make. Is it journalism malpractice to do so? Maybe. (For example, the NFL provides global numbers for The Super Bowl. So if you compared the Tyson/Paul fight to the US only number, that’s not flat-out misleading.)
- Second, don’t compare different data sources. This is maybe a little more controversial, and tougher even for me to adhere to, but overall, you shouldn’t compare, say Samba TV viewership numbers to Nielsen’s or TVision’s to Showlab’s. For example, Nielsen pegs the Super Bowl’s viewership at 120 million viewers in America; Samba TV had it at 39 million. That’s a big difference! I see this all the time. Each data source has wildly different viewership methodologies, which means their numbers can differ wildly. Compare them to their own data, not to each other.
Data Lesson Two: Data Needs Sample Size to Be Data
Whenever I see a new data source, my first question is: what can I compare this to? A data point with no context provides no information.
To illustrate this, suppose you go to your doctor. He takes a blood test. He comes back and tells you your score is a 15. The obvious question you have: What does a 15 mean? If the normal human measures a 2, then a 15 sounds really bad! Now, for a medical test, with millions of data points, doctors can tell you what is normal, above average or below average. That’s the context!
We’ll see this with the Tyson/Paul fight a few time. What does 108 million global viewers according to TVision mean? What about 60 million households? Without context—meaning additional data point—we don’t know, and that should limit the sweeping conclusions we draw.
Data Lesson Three: Average Minute Audience =/= YouTube Views =/= Completed Views Estimate =/= Peak Concurrent Users =/= Households =/= Total Hours Watched
(For non-excel users, =/= is how you type “does not equal”. The opposite of an “=“ sign.)
As usual, I’m not writing today’s article to “go viral”, because the articles that tend to spread the furthest online take the most liberties with their data analysis. They sacrifice accuracy for hype over the new trend. The headline “Tyson/Paul fight is the 15th biggest Netflix title of all time” just doesn’t grab readers in quite the same way, does it?
When it came to the Tyson/Paul fight, I again saw folks comparing it to Nielsen’s average minute audience (AMA). For decades, an AMA was the gold standard of TV measurement, so most folks have the most understanding what it means. But it means something very specific:
How many folks watched per minute during an entire broadcast in America.
Since broadcast and cable had near ubiquitous reach, that meant the numbers were large and impressive, even with that exacting standard. In today’s fragmented media ecosystem, other standards tend to have gaudier, more viral numbers. Compare that to the alternatives:
- YouTube Views: Thirty seconds of viewing, or maybe less.
- Households: Potentially just a household who logged on for seconds.
- Peak users: The total number of viewers at a moment in time, which doesn’t speak to the entire broadcast.
All these numbers are useful, but some are more useful than others. (Total hours, average minute audience and “Completed Views Estimates”, for example, are actually derived from each other.) But that doesn’t stop folks from comparing less rigorous measures (especially YouTube views) to Nielsen’s AMA. Again, is it journalism malpractice to compare YouTube views to Nielsen’s AMA? Honestly, maybe.
What We Know and What We Don’t Know
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