(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.)
Since I’ve published a number of Streaming Ratings Report double issues in a row—thanks, LAUSD, for being closed for five school days so far this year—my hypothetical notebook is just bursting with great topics to discuss. So today we’re going to look at the viewership for Netflix’s Canelo versus Crawford fight—in particular, a set of (albeit public) numbers that I haven’t seen reported anywhere—but I’m also going to write include some bonus topics—anecdata, datecdotes and such—that I’ve been storing up. These bonus topics aren’t viewership data per se, but usually some terrific (or notably poor) research on the streaming wars.
I did want to say that I’ve really appreciated the support my writing/work has gotten recently, like the great response to my article on the “Taylor Swift Data Fallacy” (find shout outs here, here and here) or my new Entertainment Industry Dictionary. It’s gotten some glowing reviews from both the FilmStack Daily Digest (and yes, “FilmStack” will be included as an entry shortly) and IndieWire, which called it “a fantastic resource”.
If you didn’t see it, I took over “The Five” over at Ted Hope’s Hope for Film newsletter. I really spent a long time trying to figure out what five points I should share with Ted’s readers, so check it out!
Finally, if I haven’t mentioned it in a bit, I’m a bit agnostic on social media. I go through periods where I post a lot on social media, and I get some traffic to the newsletter. Or I take months-long breaks from social media—like right now—and the newsletter seems to grow just as much. Regardless, if you’d like to follow me, I’m on Notes, LinkedIn, Twitter and Bluesky.
Fun side note on this: I got my first Wikipedia citation! (That I know about.) I hope more of this happens in the future, since I think viewership data will make Wikipedia’s TV show entries more accurate, so fingers crossed that happens organically. Conversely, I just read that Reddit does actively allow publishers to publish their own articles (and set up sub-Reddits), but I’m allergic to comments sections, so I’m not going to do this myself, but I will encourage you, my audience, to share links there to the relevant subreddits. (Seriously, though, don’t start a subreddit because that will drive me insane.)
On to this week’s bonus issue…
(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.)
How Big Was Canelo Álvarez vs. Terence Crawford?
Is it time to coin another new piece of jargon? The Argylle Treatment has caught on among some folks, and a lot of people enjoyed The Taylor Swift Data Fallacy.
I’ve been sitting on another phenomenon I’ve wished I had named for, frankly, nearly as long as I’ve been writing. Early on in the days of this website/newsletter, the two big shows of the summer were Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. At the time, HBO published linear ratings for America, sometimes adding streaming viewership. Netflix, though, put out global ratings.
Naturally, folks compared the two, arguing that Stranger Things was bigger.
You know I hate that. It’s not apples-to-apples. The “US viewership versus global viewership” comparison reigns as the ultimate “apples-to-apples” comparison.
That’s not precisely what I’m talking about here, though. A more insidious problem revealed itself, and frankly still happens:
If journalists or analysts don’t have data for a phenomenon, they assume it doesn’t exist!
The logical fallacy is that saying a lack of evidence is evidence for lack. It’s not. It just means you don’t have evidence. If I had to coin a term, I’d call this:
“Game of Thrones Data Amnesia”
Consider these current examples:
- Folks see Spotify publishing numbers on how many users listen to old songs. Then they assume this is a new trend, and new music is dying. In fact, “back in the day” folks listened to a ton of old music on CDs or oldies/classic rock radio stations, but no one tracked it. In fact, Billboard didn’t include old albums (Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in particular) on the charts!
- Folks see Netflix’s global viewership numbers and somehow assume that TV shows and films that aren’t on there (like Game of Thrones, but also shows like The Simpsons) have zero international viewership. Those shows do have international viewership; we just don’t measure it. (Specifically, it’s not easily collected in one place.)
- Similarly, folks assume that if we don’t have data about foreign TV consumption, it must not exist.
- And, again, folks assume that, because Netflix and YouTube publish international numbers, this is the first time people outside America have consumed American television content.
And now that data fallacy has come to boxing…
Boxing Didn’t Used To Air On Broadcast
Do you remember the biggest boxing fight of the 1990s? I do! Mike Tyson fought Evander Holyfield for the second time. My family gathered around the TV and turned on ABC to watch the fight on broadcast TV. Scratch that, not ABC. NBC. No, that’s not right. It was CBS. No, that’s not right either.
Actually, it doesn’t matter because, to quit the sarcasm, the fight wasn’t on a broadcast channel. Broadcast channels didn’t air boxing matches! And still don’t. (Though maybe soon on CBS…) It wasn’t on HBO either. While premium cable hosted some boxing, that’s not where the match was fought either.
Nope, it streamed on Pay Per View.
As such, do you think we have ratings for boxing from back in the day?
No, we don’t. Does that mean no one watched Tyson-Holyfield II? No. Everyone did. And I won’t spoil the ending for those who don’t know what happened, but it’s so tasty you can sink your teeth into it. I won’t bend your ear with it anymore.
I bring this up because we do have ratings for Netflix’s boxing matches, and in the lack of comparison, some folks default to, “Well, these boxing matches are huge and a sign that Netflix is, if anything, making them bigger!” But we don’t really have a great comparison since, as I just noted, boxing never used to air on broadcast, so we don’t have ratings for most of those huge fights.
I’d go further, because Netflix is a broadcast channel, a phrase I coined years ago to put Netflix’s monster ratings in context. But that means we’re comparing boxing fights that used to arrive on Pay Per View to fights that now stream on (again equivalently) a broadcast channel.
In other words, the boxing matches Netflix puts on differ from those in the past in two key, but utterly important ways:
- Boxing didn’t use to air in “primetime on broadcast” and essentially, they do on Netflix.
- Netflix doesn’t charge users extra, like Pay Per View of old.
The Viewership Numbers
That’s the context to analyze their latest fight, “Canelo Álvarez versus Terence Crawford”. To summarize, I’d say this:
Performance: This fight was roughly half or less of the interest of the Tyson-Paul fight, but five or more times Taylor-Serrano. Interestingly, it was about equal to the NFL/Netflix’s Christmas Day games.
These comparisons come with a huge data caveat:
Data caveat: Netflix has published three different data analytics outputs for their live viewership in the US. That’s…sub-optimal.
Looking at this, since Netflix is “free”, it likely did have more casual fans tuning in than on Pay Per View. Those fans, though, don’t actually result in more revenue for either the boxers or streamer (but we do have that data and I’ll be diving into it shortly) a fact lost in most of the coverage.
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