(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.)
No year in the streaming wars is truly a “make or break” year for any given streamer, because another year is just around the corner. (Short of, I guess, a Big Tech company doing so poorly they decide to shut down their entire operation, which is not outside the realm of possibility.) I had this thought looking at a few of Amazon’s big, big shows returning in 2026:
- The second season of Beast Games debuted in early January, with a reported price tag of over $150 million.
- Citadel, the spy thriller from the Russo Bros. and possibly the most expensive show ever made for television, will likely return this spring.
- The Boys’—one of Prime Video’s biggest shows ever—final season came out just last week.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the other contender for most expensive show ever, has finished filming and could return this fall.
Now, this year is the year that Amazon’s current CEO—reminder, it’s not Jeff Bezos anymore, it’s Andy Jassy—said Amazon Prime Video/video efforts would be profitable on their own. And that’s dependent on a lot of those big shows performing well. So this year is not “make or break”, but it’s definitely a big year for them. And this chart of Prime Video returning shows worries me, with Rings of Power in particular:
The theme of Prime Video’s end of 2025 into 2026 is “streaming shows losing viewership”, and we already saw that two years ago with Rings of Power. That’s a lot of money to spend if these shows’ viewership is shrinking. And one of those big splashy shows from Amazon has already lost viewership this year.
I’m talking about Beast Games.
When I ask if a show is “successful”, I can mean either popular in general or very profitable. The bad news for Beast Games? It’s neither. And I think it’s worth diving into the data now that that show has ended its run to really cement how poorly its sophomore outing fared. Even more so because I don’t think I’ve read anyone else making this case! And the data—across at least five data sources—is incontrovertible at this point.
Plus, it’s useful to compare Beast Games to a rival show in the same genre, which is much cheaper to produce but is growing its audience year over year. And it’s worth looking for lessons for the creator economy, the single buzziest topic in the entertainment trades and press.
(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, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Tale of the Tape – Beast Games vs The Traitors
Let’s get right into the data. Sometimes, the three viewership sources I use conflict; sometimes they all tell a remarkably similar story. Intuitively, the latter is usually easier to trust. Fortunately, that’s the case today.
Yes, all the data sources tell the same story about the battle between MrBeast and Amazon’s Beast Games and Alan Cumming and Peacock’s The Traitors.
The Traitors smashed the viewership charts; Beast Games did not.
Nielsen – Beast Games Fell Off the Charts While The Traitors Got Stronger
Let’s start with Nielsen. As a reminder, the first season of Beast Games started out slowly, then made the top ten charts for multiple weeks at the end of its run. The second season had the reverse story: Beast Games made the charts the first week it came out, then never made the top ten again.
The Traitors, on the other hand, made the Nielsen top ten original charts repeatedly throughout its run this year. And it grew over time, indicating that it is both keeping its viewers coming back each season and attracting new customers, and likely some of those new customers are binging previous seasons.
Here’s the key comparison chart:
(As a reminder, if a show misses the Nielsen top ten charts, I don’t have data for it. That doesn’t mean the show had zero viewership, just it’s an unknown, but by logic, smaller than the smallest show in the top ten charts, which averages 6 to 6.5 million hours.)
Last year, I pulled a couple of comparison charts using the Nielsen data, but I don’t think I need to do that this year because…well…the charts won’t show anything different! Beast Games’ second season only made it for one single week! Every other comparison would be up against sophomore seasons like Fallout or The Pitt or whatnot that made the charts for multiple weeks.
Still, we can say that among season two shows, Beast Games ranks 135th out of 158 second seasons in my data set (data through 9-Mar-2026). That’s not great! The Traitors, on the other hand, had a season four that ranks 14th out of 116 shows, and it’s the first reality show on the charts. (The next biggest fourth season reality show is Love is Blind, and those are the two top unscripted shows in the 20 all time.) That’s a hit! (My bar for hit is above the top 15%.)
Samba TV – These Two Shows Switched Spots
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so please subscribe.
We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this post about the Streaming Ratings Report, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
