(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.)
Let’s kick off today with a fun fact to impress your friends:
In July, Paramount+ only released three new original TV shows, and none of them moved the needle on the ratings charts.
This isn’t to say they didn’t have shows do well for them. Paramount+ shared Your Honor, Dexter and Evil with Netflix, and that bigger platform helped propel all three onto the Nielsen top ten lists. But as for Paramount+ itself, it looks like they took the summer off. (Those three new shows? Mafia Spies, Kamp Koral: Spongebob’s Under Years, and Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken) Maybe this was to wait for football as a driver of retention, or wanting to avoid the Summer Olympics, or a general content pullback across the industry, or relying on their weekly series (Mayor of Kingstown and Evil), but they pulled back nonetheless.
It’s also interesting, because in spite of that light release schedule, Paramount Global owned or co-owned seven titles on the Nielsen Top 30 charts this week: Criminal Minds, Dexter, NCIS, Evil, Spongebob Squarepants, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I and IF:
(For those free subscribers out there, I publish this top 30 chart each week at the end of each newsletter.)
The caveat is that several of those seven titles were shared with other streamers, like Netflix or Prime Video. But still! Paramount’s success mostly gets overlooked in the coverage of the streaming wars or the entertainment industry.
Still, that little Paramount detail is why I like my approach, which involves reviewing EVERYTHING the streamers put out there and looking at as many viewership/interest charts as I can handle each week. I think I uncover little details that other outlets, in a chase for virality by focusing on trending shows, tend to miss.
So let’s dive into the ratings for the week of 22-July. On the TV side, it was a bit light, with no TV shows getting over 20 million hours of viewership on the Nielsen charts. We still had some interesting stories, including a new Netflix true crime series popping on the chart, Presumed Innocent finally making the Nielsen charts, a look at slow-growing hits, more library titles boosted by big theatrical releases, a check-in on Your Honor and Dexter, some fun stats on podcasts, the Olympics opening ceremony’s ratings (which were big, but possibly over-hyped), all the flops, bombs and misses of the week (there were a bunch on the the TV side of things), and more.
But we’ll start with a big number for a theatrical film on Netflix….
(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 July 22nd to July 28th.)
Film – Ghostbusters Busts Open…
If you only look at the total viewership, Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire had a terrific opening week when it arrived on Netflix. Seriously, here are the top single-week openings for streaming (both theatrical and straight-to-streaming) so far in 2024:
On the Nielsen charts, opening above 23.4 million hours is great! The caveat is that it opened on a Monday, giving it a full seven days of viewership. Thus, if you factor in “viewership per day”, this isn’t nearly as impressive.
Here’s the top viewership per day this year:
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you want to read about…
- The winner in the “viewership per day” crown for streaming films in 2024…
- A look at slow-growing TV show hits…
- Whether or not Presumed Innocent, Those About to Die and Mayor of Kingstown are “hits or hits for them”…
- A check-in on Cobra Kai, Too Hot to Handle, and Bridgerton…
- What kids series got an early boost from a Netflix film…
- All the flops, bombs and misses for the week…
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 these posts about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
