(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
Before we get to the last two weeks of streaming viewership data, let’s talk about “The Lizardman’s Constant”.
YouGov’s Substack newsletter had a great bit of polling meta-analysis in a subsection titled, “How to read polls about obscure topics”. They (accurately) argue that, no, 9% of the population doesn’t have a favorable opinion of the Black Plague. And yes, that is a real poll result.
Due to a variety of factors, polling on low salience topics—like, say, Americans’ feelings on the Black Plague—can lead to bizarre results. Years ago, Scott Alexander dubbed it “The Lizardman’s Constant” as in, according to poll after poll, some portion of society believes that Lizardmen run the government.
These results say more about polling than the poll itself. Data analysis is hard. Finding good, reliable data is hard. Analyzing said data is also hard. And polling data is a great example. Doing public opinion polls is crucial, vital work, but won’t deliver 100% accuracy. In the case of poll results like this, the key is to focus on the directional impact, not the actual number itself. My biggest complaint with most polls I read is that they’re one-time polls, so I can’t draw firm conclusions. But most news coverage either implies or directly concludes that one-off polls tell us something about trends over time, usually taking a counter-intuitive result and implying it’s changed from the past. This is why we need organizations like YouGov and Pew to ask the same questions over time, so we can compare the results.
This directly applies to streaming/TV viewership. By taking a “poll of polls” approach to the streaming data, I look for shows that do well on multiple metrics, so we don’t interpret outliers as meaningful. More importantly, I try to track streaming ratings over time, to put shows into context, not just celebrate a show or film topping the charts.
Okay, on to today’s article. In honor of Earth Day, I’ll look at the state of nature documentaries, a few weekly shows that finally fell off the charts, why the streaming wars still might be more competitive, which two films benefitted from tragic news, which Apple+ show continues to do well, check in on a bunch of shows like Black Mirror, The Handsmaids Tale, Pulse, and The Last of Us, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
Next week, I plan to review the performance of 2024’s biggest or most notable weekly-released shows, but let’s kick off this issue by looking at a few more entries in the Emmy season push…
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of April 4th to April 27th.)
Television – Disney Tries Out Another Release Style as Netflix Goes Back to the Binge
Three notable new TV shows came out over these two weeks (reminder, the weeks starting 14-April and 21-April), and as has been the case for the past few weeks, they show the streamers still showing flexibility in how they release their shows. Let’s go in order from biggest to smallest…
You has somehow entered its fifth season. Unlike its fourth season, which Netflix split up into two batches in 2023, this one came out in one big ‘ol batch. Here’s how it stacks up to previous seasons:
Premiering to 27.9 million hours is pretty good, though it’s actually lower than the start of season four, which had 28.9 million hours. This show has epic IMDb scores (a 7.7 on 338K), but it may be losing its audience like a lot of other Netflix series.
(Stay tuned to the very, very end for yet another wrinkle in the binge versus batch release debate.)
Netflix also released Ransom Canyon, the show I keep joking is a Taylor Sheridan copycat because, well, it looks like it? It handily won the week for Netflix on the Luminate charts, so it’s off to a strong start, though it only had 18.7 million hours in its opening on Nielsen. On Samba TV, it had 1.5 million households watch in the first four days, which is fine. Unlike the Sheridan shows, though, it only has a 6.7 on 6.7K IMDb reviews, which is very low.
That leaves everyone’s favorite mystery show, as in mystery in how popular it really is. I speak of Andor, the second season of the Star Wars show on Disney+.
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