Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Graphs, charts and other infographics that help explain the business of entertainment.
[This is the week! After Friday, my paywall goes up. I don’t want to beg, so just know that this is the last week to get the “Founder’s Price” of $120 a year, per year, forever. No price increases. It’s a thank you to all of my loyal supporter and
One of the pieces of advice Substack gives you when you start trying to “monetize” is to keep putting out lots of good content for free subscribers. They recommend this because most people’s gut—including my own!—is to do the opposite, hoarding your good stuff behind your paywall like Smaug hoarding
Well, last week we had pretty big news: the Warner Bros (formerly Warner Media) and Discovery merger officially closed. I had covered this topic in-depth when the deal cleared the final regulatory hurdles in February, if you want my thoughts. But what about the political machinations of last week, like
As everyone likely knows, Netflix changed metrics on us. Previously, the world’s biggest streamer released the number of subscribers (or households/accounts) that watched 2 minutes of a given show or film in the first 28 days. (I called these datecdotes.) Now, and going forward, they’re releasing the total hours viewed
Yesterday, I covered the strategy thinking behind Netflix’s latest data drop. Today, I’m going to dig into the initial takeaways I have from the data and how I plan to use it. And then I’ll be finished talking about this new data release. Kidding! I’m far from done. I still
When Netflix releases their quarterly datecdotes (Click here for my explainer on that term, my phrase for any Netflix data point about households watching 2+ minutes of a film in the first 28 days), they tend to come in two flavors. Like, for example, this tweet: Or this quote in a
Last week, I used Nielsen’s top ten list to track their total viewership in April 2020 to April of this year. The question I raised, but couldn’t answer, was whether the decline in total top ten viewership applied to the rest of Netflix’s catalogue. Enter Nielsen’s The Gauge! (Which I
We’ve hit an exciting point in the “streaming ratings era”: We can now compare 2020 to 2021. Meaning we have better “context” than ever before. In 2020, we had to speculate if year-over-year viewership was up or down. Now, we know. Visual of the Week – Streaming Was Down 40%
Yesterday, I speculated that Netflix had a weak summer for content, and until the end of December, this may have caused its usage to slip. This was driven by the Nielsen weekly data, which hit a peak in March and in the middle of November. Yet, I can’t show that
Every so often, as I pull data for a given article or to make a point, I come across a database that’s worth exploring further. (Which is why I created the “visual of the week” feature!) For example, in 2018 I stumbled across The-Number’s home entertainment data for the United