(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.)
So, a question: is anyone else as skeptical about prediction markets as I am?
Just last week, I read an article where a political pundit cited prediction markets as evidence of his position…and only six people had voted on said prediction. I’m not sure you can glean anything from a vote of just six random people! I’m hoping that, fairly soon, when reporters and pundits cite prediction markets, they’ll start mentioning the number of folks actually betting and the size of said bets.
But I have two other concerns:
- First, even if a prediction appears to have a lot of bettors, at least one study credibly accuses one prediction market of using “wash trading” (betting on both sides of something to make it look like there is more activity/action than there is). Many, many digital platforms have fraud and bot problems, and that applies to prediction markets.
- Second, I’ve never seen a good analysis on whether prediction markets are actually…predictive. Does anyone have any studies on prediction markets’ track record? If you do, send them along! It’s a topic that I want to explore more in the future.
On to this week’s issue, where the big news is Stranger Things smashing records...and Sean Combs, a.k.a. P Diddy/Puff Daddy, whose docu-series is also smashing it. We’re just going to review TV today, including the latest scripted drama from the creator of Sons of Anarchy, Landman’s continuing growth, the Macy’s Day Parade also setting records, all the TV misses, including a pricey Apple TV miss and a merciful end to one of the weirdest shows of the peak TV era, and a whole lot more.
I was going to try to jam all the film, sports and TV viewership news into one report, but I had just too much, so expect the second part of this report later this week.
But let’s start with some record breaking TV shows…
(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. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of November 24th to December 7th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Stranger Things and Sean Combs Smash Records
Just last issue, I told you about the conundrum of holiday weekends. As big as they are for viewership, they’re also earned media dead zones—“earned media” meaning free news coverage like reviews, recaps or interviews with celebrities—so streamers tend to avoid launching buzzy new shows during these weekends.
But I should have mentioned one other reason streamers may have sat out this Thanksgiving weekend:
The return of Stranger Things.
That show is so big, it sucks all the viewership oxygen out of the TV viewing room. And I can see why other streamers would avoid it, akin to when other studios cleared out of the way of Marvel films in the 2010s.
Seriously, it smashed records. I had a conversation with some other data nerds and I wondered if this new outing would break 100 million hours in one week.
Well, it did. It had the single biggest week in Nielsen streaming viewership history.
In fact, the start of the fifth season (just four episodes) actually got over 140 million hours. That’s the biggest week we’ve ever seen. It’s so big that it makes everything else look too small on the charts. Seriously, here’s my typical “Last Six Weeks of Nielsen Viewing” line chart with Stranger Things on it:
Yep, it joined the “40 Million Hour Club”, as have several football streaming shows this season (though some of that is due to the change in Nielsen methodology for sports), but just look at Stranger Things versus…the other most popular shows of all time:
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