(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.)
Here’s the craziest thing about Beast Games, the new reality competition show from YouTuber Mr. Beast that premiered on Prime Video in December:
Almost no one is talking about it.
I mean, seriously. I’ve found some bad reviews online, and some recap articles, but not many. I haven’t seen any pieces analyzing Beast Games and what it says about the future of entertainment, Hollywood, and the creator economy. I searched Google News and found zilch. I searched the trades...not much. Sure, each one had an article dutifully repeating Amazon’s datecdote about its viewership, but even The Hollywood Reporter’s link felt skeptical.
The silence feels deafening, and today’s article will explain why.
Of course, some people are calling Beast Games a hit. Well, Mr. Beast himself:
Does Donaldson’s “number one in almost 90 countries” claim mean his show is a hit? Not really. But…what is a hit? Fair question.
It’s the top 10% of shows and films, overall and by genre/type.
This is a “hit-driven business” after all—a truism that still holds up—and the hits pay for the rest. And what percentage of films pay for everything else? The top 10%. Those films and TV shows have the outsized returns that make the entire portfolio play of Hollywood work. When I say something isn’t a hit, I’m using this simple, and logical, framework.
This week, as we catch up on the final streaming ratings reports of 2024, we’ll look at a few different programs to judge, “hit, miss or something in between”. Including…
Mr. Beast’s reality competition show Beast Games (not a hit, not a miss, but somewhere in between)
The NFL on Netflix (a HUGE hit)
Squid Game season two (a giant, leviathan-of-the-seas-sized hit)
After this week, I’ll finally be “caught up” on streaming ratings from 2024!
For Beast Games, the data is decidedly mixed. This show is not a hit—no matter what data you look at or how you cut it—but it also isn’t a flop or bomb either. Yes, it was expensive and probably didn’t pay for itself, but its somewhat middling performance isn’t nearly as egregious as other big misses of recent years.
That said, that performance snapshot also explains one of the big mysteries of the streaming era: if YouTube stars really can command a devoted audience of 100+ million fans, why aren’t the streamers hiring them or buying their shows?
Let’s dive in!
(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, and 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 March 4th to March 11th.)
BLUF - Beast Games Isn’t a Hit, But It Isn’t a Flop Either
First, I’ll run down the data we have, then I’ll put that viewership data into context.
The Data
First, let me just give you the numbers. As a reminder, Beast Games premiered with two episodes on 19-Dec, then one episode came out per week after that.
I’ll use Nielsen’s data the most today, since it has the largest data set for streaming viewership numbers, so we can make the best comparisons. On Nielsen, Beast Games missed the charts in its first week, then had 6.8 million hours in its second week, and then 6.6 million hours in its third. (I begged Nielsen for a preview on that last data point, it’s preliminary as an FYI.) For most shows, anything below 10 million hours in a week is a bad sign, unless you’re a weekly show that lasts on the charts for weeks and weeks. Even accounting for a possible long runtime on the charts, these aren’t huge numbers; I’d call it mixed.
The results are mixed for Samba TV too. Beast Games missed the weeks of 16-Dec and 23-Dec but crept onto the charts the week of 30-Dec in 10th place. By the week of 6-Jan, the show climbed up to 6th place and held that place through the week of 13-Jan. That’s a sign it might be able to hold onto its viewership week after week.
Third, according to Luminate, Beast Games has only made the top ten charts for one week (its fifth week of release, the week of 17-Jan), but it never cracked the 5 million hours per week total. That’s a bit lower than Nielsen had, but it has a steady, if small, audience.
Fourth, Beast Games didn’t make any of the interest charts like JustWatch, Reelgood and TV Time. Now, maybe Mr. Beast told his curious followers where to find his new show, so no one needed to search for it, which is a reasonable explanation. Then again, if a show switches platforms, it’s going to get some interest online. (For example, even Squid Game makes these charts and you’d guess that most everyone knows where that show is streaming.) Frankly, you almost never see a popular show make zero interest charts. (Especially for someone with such a dynamic online presence like Mr. Beast.)
The other data is similarly mixed. Reality competition shows tend not to have a lot of IMDb reviews, and this show joins that club with only a 5.1 on 9.6K reviews. (It appears to be the subject of a downvoting campaign.) I don’t usually analyze Amazon reviews—mainly because they’d mostly apply to Amazon first-run shows and films—but they do correlate with popularity, and Beast Games has only 600 reviews as of this writing.
For comparison, The Rings of Power has over 30K, and Reacher has over 10K, though a recently moderately popular show like Cross only has 743 as of this writing. Reacher and Cross both have 4.5 ratings, but The Rings of Power has a 3.5. Beast Games has a four.
I’d also add, this show really struggled to generate interest as measured by Google Trends:
Last of all, oh yeah, Amazon’s datecdote. Amazon’s preferred number now is to say when a show or film gets to over 50 million “viewers”, leaving viewers undefined. Fortunately, they’ve given us this data point enough times that we can compare it to other shows. While Beast Games took 26 days to get to 50 million viewers, it took 16 days for Fallout to get to 65 million viewers, and a mere three days for Red One to get to 50 million viewers. These all lag behind the Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power, which reached 25 million viewers in its first day and 100 million in its first three months. The second season reached 40 million viewers in the first 11 days.
As for the “number one show” in a country metric…that doesn’t mean much, frankly.
I think this show, compared to other reality shows, may travel better due to Donaldson’s global platform on YouTube. But Amazon—like most streamers—doesn’t release that many new shows each week, so a new show almost by default should debut at number one around the world. Really, if your show doesn’t do that it’s a huge miss. (Amazon did say half the viewership of the show was global, an interesting data point I’ll discuss in a future article.)
That’s the data. What does it mean?
Comp 1: Is it a Hit for…Prime Video?
Is Beast Games a hit for Prime Video? The easiest way to answer that is to look at all Prime Video shows that have made the Nielsen top ten charts.
Does that look like a hit to you?
Through three weeks, it’s still behind Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets and A League of Their Own, the latter of which got cancelled, but both those shows were binge-released versus Beast Games’ weekly released episodes. I separated them by weekly and binge shows, but, yeah…
It’s still not even in the ballpark of a show like The Terminal List or The Wheel of Time.
In the context of Prime Video’s streaming history, this show isn’t a hit. This is also why all three trades went with “most watched unscripted” show.
Comp 2: Is it a Hit for…a Reality TV Show?
You’ll note Prime Video doesn’t have many reality TV shows make the charts in the first place, so it’s a pinch unfair to compare Beast Games to scripted genre swings like The Rings of Power, Fallout, Reacher or Cross.
What about other reality shows? Here are some select top reality shows:
This news is a bit better for Beast Games. Compared to a show like Physical: 100, it actually does fairly well, and may best it in total viewership. Compared to the tops of the reality genre, though, Love is Blind or Squid Games: The Challenge, it’s not close. I’d add, even a show like The Traitors frequently makes the interest charts like JustWatch and Reelgood, something Beast Games failed to do. (I’m anticipating The Traitors’ third season will do well.)
Again, for a reality show it’s not a hit, but it’s at least in the conversation. If it can keep making the Nielsen top ten charts—and Luminate’s data says it won’t; Samba TV’s says it might—then it may move up to the top tier.
Even if it moves up to “in the conversation for a top show”, Beast Games has two things working against it in a performance analysis like this, something that a show like The Traitors, for example, doesn’t. First, Amazon put a LOT of owned marketing and on-site advertising behind Beast Games. That gives it an advantage few other shows have.
Second, most reality shows don’t cost $10 million an episode. Let’s account for that.
Comp 3: Is it a Hit for…a Big Budget Show?
If you had asked me in 2010, spending $10 million per episode on a TV show would have been considered an outrageous sum. In today’s streaming era though—even as the streaming bubble deflates—it’s honestly not that big of a number. But it is still much, much bigger than most similar competition reality shows. The shows that justify $10 million budgets tend to be upper-tier dramas.
I’d call this “big budget” but not “huge budget”, a category I reserve for shows north of $15 million an episode, the biggest of big drama swings of the current era.
So, as a big budget show, is this a big hit? In this case, it’s still a “No”. Comparing it to weekly hits from the last year like Landman, Shogun or Poker Face—shows with similar budgets—and Beast Games definitely started slower:
Plus, many of these shows continued to make the Nielsen top ten charts for weeks after. For Beast Games to even be in the conversation, it needs to keep making the charts. (Landman, for example, ends up breaking 20 million hours on the Nielsen charts!)
Bottom Line…
Add it all up, and I’d say that Beast Games definitely isn’t a flop or a miss. You won’t see it in my 2024 recap articles.
We can also firmly say it isn’t a hit, though. This isn’t a show in the top 10% of any metric I track, whether accounting for just 2024 or all-time or just reality shows or especially for big budget shows.
Really, the bigger issue is the cost. Beast Games is a disappointment for Amazon because of what they paid for it. If you shell out a reported nine figures to make a TV show ($100 million), you’d hope the show does really, really well. Especially if a budget figure in that range is well outside the norm for a show of this type (competition reality TV).
What matters is why this price was so high...
So…Should Hollywood Rush Out to Sign YouTube Stars?
Let’s finish with the strategic brass tacks. It matters whether Beast Games is a hit or a flop is strategically very important because it (possibly) helps answer a key question slowly popping up in the media:
Why doesn’t Hollywood sign more YouTube stars to make TV shows?
First, we need to consider “The Taylor Swift Problem”.
That problem—which I just coined!—is when someone is the absolute biggest person in their field and we compare other people to them. For example, when Taylor Swift released her concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, in theaters last year, she made $180 million in the US. Lots of folks speculated she would create a new boom in concert films. They might save theaters!
They did not.
In fact, Beyonce’s concert film released a couple of months later made only a fraction of the money that Taylor’s did. This year, Olivia Rodrigo’s concert film on Nielsen didn’t even chart. When someone is the best at what they do, anyone copying them will do orders of magnitude worse.
That’s the worry for other YouTube stars. Comparing Mr. Beast/Donaldson to anyone else on YouTube just doesn’t make sense. He’s order of magnitude more popular than everyone else. A one-of-one.
So even if Beast Games were a massive hit, it’s unlikely other streamers could replicate it. As is, Beast Games is at best a mid-tier show, meaning other shows will be small to non-existent.
Second, social media/social video/YouTube followers are not converting to legacy media channels. (And to be clear, “legacy media” in this case refers to a tech company’s streamer.) Mr. Beast is the absolute BIGGEST star on YouTube, but again, according to Nielsen, about 6 million people watched his show per week. Since Amazon told us the viewers are roughly 50/50 US to global, that means maybe 10 to 12 million regular viewers per week. The real question is…
For a personality with 350 million YouTube subscribers, how come so few wanted to watch his new show?
If we take YouTube’s numbers at face value—and I don’t! Nor should you! Read here!—then about say 12 million folks watching per week, then about 2-7% of Donaldson’s audience is tuning in, and that assumes that nearly 100% of Beast Games’ audience watched his YouTube channel. (Not to mention, to get to that 7% number I assumed half his followers are fake…)
That’s a low conversion rate for presumably one of the biggest influencers going!
On TikTok, again it’s even worse. Previously, one of the biggest flops on streaming was The D’Amelio Show on Hulu, a TikTok creator who is one of the biggest stars on TikTok, but not influential enough to get her hundreds of millions of fans to actually, you know, watch her show. Allegedly, Charli D’Amelio has 159 million followers on TikTok and 11.8 billion likes, but no one watched her Hulu show. Actually, while we’re at it, Mr. Beast has 119 million TikTok followers. Again they didn’t watch.)
All of this will be an ongoing reality for YouTubers. If top YouTube creators ask for paydays based on their big YouTube numbers, Hollywood won’t pay, since those numbers don’t translate to actual viewership. This is probably why you haven’t seen an avalanche of headlines about YouTubers signing deals with streamers.
It also ties to a point I made about Joe Rogan’s podcast and will make a lot more in the future:
The big reason these stars don’t translate off YouTube is that the top YouTube metrics are likely misleading.
Whether it’s due to the “view” metric counting too many very short watches, the US to global split misleading folks comparing them to US-only numbers, subscriber counts including too many lapsed viewers, or bot traffic artificially inflating numbers, YouTube views and subscriber counts just don’t translate to viewership off YouTube.