(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.)
Usually, I try to open the Streaming Ratings Report with a light-hearted or wry observation/tangent, but this week, obviously, my heart goes out to everyone affected by the Los Angeles area fires. I’ve had good friends who were evacuated and almost lost their homes.
On to this week’s issue, which might be one of the busiest of the year. Due to its importance to the future of streaming, I wrote a full article analyzing all the data for the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight (which was on 15-Nov) back in December. Today, we’re covering the weeks of 11-Nov (which included new releases by nearly every streamer, including The Day of the Jackal, Cobra Kai, Landman, Silo, and Dune: Prophecy plus movies like Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters and Emilia Perez) and 18-Nov (which included more big shows like A Man on the Inside, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Based on a True Story, and Interior Chinatown and the films Spellbound and Alien: Romulus). Plus my thoughts on the difference between movies critics love and audiences just…don’t, Yellowstone’s linear debut, and Pew’s surprising numbers on social media use.
If that sounds like a lot…it is. Let’s dive in.
(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 November 11th to November 24th.)
Television – Binge, Weekly or…Something Else?
When an entire industry gets disrupted, it forces (or should force) everyone to try different tactics to win.
Take release styles. Sure, Netflix pioneered the binge model and many folks copied them. But a few streamers tried different tactics and still are. During the weeks of 11-Nov and 18-Nov, I counted five different release styles. Five! We had nearly as many different release styles as big new shows. So we’ll talk about the contenders of the week in order of most “binge” to least.
Binge
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