A Licensed TV Check-In: The Simpsons, Friends and Low Budget Reality Shows
The Streaming Ratings Report for 8-Dec-2023
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what is 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.)
I loved Elaine Low’s Ankler article on what TV shows people are buying around town, and I’m not going to lie: a big reason why is confirmation bias. This is what I’ve been arguing for all year! (If not longer...) Most viewers like watching comedies that are actually funny1 (I don’t know how many times I’ve written that) and procedurals.2 (Suits seems to have finally punctured the Hollywood/streaming’s anti-popular content prestige bubble.)
We had a few years where, frankly, making money on streaming didn’t matter, so ratings data didn’t matter. Now that things have changed, so have buying habits.
From a business perspective, this is a great example of how having accurate data can give you an edge over your competitors. If you knew that viewers wanted procedurals (a popular genre) while everyone else was bidding up other, less popular genres (like say sports docu-dramas, dramedies, and prestige dramas) you could pay less to get more; now that everyone reads this streaming ratings report, you’re buying at the height of the market.
Don’t follow the herd or conventional wisdom, especially if it’s not supported by data!
Speaking of data, I keep flip-flopping on whether or not we have or we’ll see a “content slowdown” on streaming in America, driven by the strikes. I wrote in recent reports I hadn’t seen the data for it yet, after seeing a small slowdown in August. But now I’ve flipped again. On the Nielsen charts this week, Bluey was the top non-NFL TV show or film! The top film barely got over 10 million hours viewed!
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of stuff to talk about, including a check-in on a host of second run shows, a rare anime title on the TV charts, Nielsen’s The Gauge, a disappointing start for The Killer, another Paramount+ show making the charts (from guess who!), all the flops and misses of the week, the season finale of Loki, the one sports program whose ratings are down, and a whole lot more.
Finally, a poll for paid subscribers: how do you feel about me unlocking old posts? I’m personally very hesitant to do this, but a few other substackers—like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith—do it regularly. I want to reserve my data analysis for the paying subscribers who afford me the time to spend days collecting and crunching the numbers for said data analysis, but I also like the idea of (very occasionally) unlocking very old (at least a year) posts that are mostly about strategy and don’t have a lot of data in them. (Don’t expect me to ever unlock my analysis on theaters and streaming, the WGA residual bonus, or past Streaming Ratings Report issues.)
So chime in!