Explaining the Business of Entertainment
If you read my “Who Won the Month” articles over at Decider—here, here, here, here, here or here—you’re probably wondering where one of my favorite data tools has been. That’s right, I’m talking about Google Trends data. It’s not perfect but when it works, it works wonders. And this week,
(Editor’s Note: This is the second edition of a new website feature, a weekly report on streaming ratings. One of the quirks of the streaming wars is that no one knows what shows or movies are doing well, what are doing poorly and what failed to launch. If you have
(Editor’s Note: Today, I am testing a new website feature, a weekly report on streaming ratings. One of the biggest pain points of the coverage of the streaming wars seems to be that no one knows what is doing well, what is doing poorly and, frankly, what customers want. For
Last week got away from me. Fine, I got away from it by diving down a data hole. Specifically, a Covid-19 data problem. For all the forecasting being done, few people are answering the query, “Hey, when will all this end?” I’ve seen answers ranging from “Never” to “2022” to
Starting last August, Nielsen began releasing a weekly American top 10 most watched list for streaming video. I’ve been using it ever since. Nielsen mixed together TV and movies, and new (“originals”), second-run and library (“acquired”) titles on the same list. In their year-end top ten list, though, Nielsen flipped
It’s rare–though not as rare as it seems–for a company to compete not just for the top spot in my weekly judgement of the most important story in entertainment, but to have two different stories compete. HBO Max has actually done that a few times, and so has Netflix and
Want an in-depth look at Netflix’s 2020? I mean a couple of thousand words on everything from their stock price to subscriber growth to their biggest content to executive moves? And what it all means? Well, check out my latest at Whats-On-Netflix, “Netflix’s 2020 Year in Review: Biggest Hits &
As The Stranger told The Dude, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. Such was last week’s weekly column for me. (By the way, check out this great article on the origins of the quote above.) I had a lot of thoughts percolating about the most
When a Netflix earnings report comes out, it generates lots of news. Usually, though, they don’t claim the top spot in my most important story of the week, because not much really changes. This week, though, Netflix did make some news. So let’s make it… (Sign up for my newsletter
Ah, for the olden days of evaluating content. In 2019, if you wanted to know, “What was the most popular film?”, you just looked at the box office and saw that the answer was (very clearly) Avengers: Endgame. Even TV was relatively simple: Game of Thrones set global records for