Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Graphs, charts and other infographics that help explain the business of entertainment.
Today, I’m getting my “visual of the week” feature back on track. (Has this feature ever actually been weekly? No, so I should probably change the name…) When I say “visual”, I don’t necessarily mean “chart” or something numerical. This isn’t “chart of the week”, it’s a “visual”, loosely defined.
It’s playoffs baby! Not for sports, mind you. (Though technically the MLB All-Star game is on.) I mean for streaming. Earnings season starts tomorrow! For Netflix, it’s a fairly important quarter, coming off two down quarters for the world’s leading streamer. (Though that’s kind of like U.S. elections: every election
[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%