(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.)
Man, we’re barreling through this year’s content recap. Today, I’m looking at the rest of the “winners” in TV, focusing on Nielsen’s weekly data and Samba TV’s weekly top ten lists, with over twenty different images.
But let’s open with a pretty juicy data cut…is the number of mega-hit streaming shows going down?
What’s Up With the Forty Million Hours Club?
Each week, I track Nielsen’s three weekly top ten lists, which consist of the top ten original TV shows, top ten acquired shows, and top ten films (which I covered here). One fun, totally arbitrary metric I created to look for a mega-hit shows is my “Forty Million Hours Club”, a TV show that grabs forty million hours in a single week according to Nielsen.
Here’s every TV show that has ever accomplished that feat for the last four years:
In 2022, Netflix had 24 TV shows join this illustrious club. In 2023, that number dropped down to fifteen shows. Last year, Netflix only had eleven shows join the 40-million-hour club. Even more concerning, most of 2023’s 40-million-hour club shows belonged to Suits. And this year, it was the NFL.
So let’s take that same graph, but highlight those two programs:
This speaks to what a big show Fallout was for Prime Video, and what a monster the NFL is (in America), regardless of whether its games are on linear, broadcast, cable, streaming, whatever.
Interestingly, Netflix only had four mega-hit shows last year: Fool Me Once, Love is Blind’s seventh season, Bridgerton and Squid Game. This should change in 2025 with returning shows like Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Wednesday. Also, Netflix batch-released a number of shows last year, but it seems like they’re returning to the binge release style going forward, which may add more 40 million hour club entries. So we’ll see if this trend continues or not.
On to the winners of 2024 specifically. To start, let’s look at all shows of any type on the Nielsen charts, categorized by whether they are new, returning or an acquired show…
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to know more about the winners in TV for 2024, to see…
- Another look at whether the streaming wars are getting more competitive…
- Lists of the top returning, new, and acquired TV shows…
- Which reality TV show bested Squid Game in viewership…
- How weekly-released shows keep crushing it on the returning charts, but how they struggle to the debut charts…
- Which HBO show crushed the Samba TV charts, but not so much on Nielsen…
- Check-ins on the top TV shows by genre, IP, and language…
- 21 more charts, tables and graphs…
…and more, please click here and subscribe. We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
