Can Joey Chestnut Defeat the NFL in the Streaming Ratings Wars?
The Streaming Ratings Report for 11-Oct-2024
(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.)
Before we get into this week’s jam-packed double issue of streaming ratings, I’d like to recap a couple of fun (and by “fun”, I mean “frustrating”) little content tidbits.
Topic 1: Scheduling Theatrical Kids Films. As someone who wants more kids films in theaters (and coming from a dad who went to the movies three weekends in a row), I have to ask:
How did Hollywood end up releasing two kids films back-to-back? (Transformers One the week before The Wild Robot)
No, seriously, the next big kids film comes out Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe Paramount was scared off by two indie animated films, Hit Pig or Gracie and Pedro to the Rescue, that are coming out before then, but I wouldn’t be. Conversely, August was completely devoid of kids films, and Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film came out at that time last year, and it did well. I would have found a better slot for Transformers One.
Topic 2: Budgets matter! Disney had two embarrassing leaks in the last two weeks, revealing that The Acolyte cost at least $230 million (with massive cost overruns and a very looooong development period) and The Marvels cost nearly $378 million. No big budget film should ever be made for that much if it’s not an Avengers film or directed by James Cameron.
On to this week’s double issue. We didn’t have that many shows, but the ones that did come out were big, like Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, Peacock’s Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, and a new Nicole Kidman murder show, The Perfect Couple. For the week of 9-Sep, a new batch of Emily in Paris episodes came out along with another Netflix straight-to-streaming film, Uglies. But the biggest new show was a hot dog eating contest. Kidding! It was the NFL. Also, I take a look at Rebel Ridge and ask, did it meet the hype? All that and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive right 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 September 2nd to September 15th.)
Sports - Real Sports vs. Sort-of Sports...Who Wins?
At some point, I probably need to compile a list of “Rules for Hollywood”, because people love lists like that, and if I did, I’d almost certainly include a rule like:
“Nothing replaces actual sports content.”
Football Comes ROARING Back!!!
What’s the old marketing jingle? Back and better than ever? Yeah, streaming football is back…and better than ever.
The return of the NFL the week of 2-Sep proved it is still the most popular thing to watch in America, on streaming or otherwise.
The NFL opened to “record” ratings with 29.2 million viewers. Yes, compared to the past, this number now includes out-of-home viewership, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but also: this number is still friggin’ huge. Also, NBC told us that 4.6 million of those viewers were streaming-only.
The next day, Peacock’s Friday night game (the NFL is legally prevented from having games on Friday nights competing with high school football, but since the season started earlier this year, they could have a Friday night game, showing that that legislation exists for a reason!) garnered 14.2 million viewers. According to Sports Media Watch, this ranks ahead of every TNF game last season except for two.
As I’ve been doing for the last three seasons, I convert this to “total hours viewed” to make a comparison to streaming, which means this football game was the biggest show of the week:
Notably, it also shows a big jump for Peacock compared to last year’s streaming-only match (on a Saturday), though it pales in comparison to their playoff game:
The conclusions are fairly obvious: playoffs matter more than late December games, and early season games do a bit better than later in the season, when some team’s seasons are essentially over.
Thursday Night Football returned to Prime Video returned week 2 of the NFL season (NBC gets to stream the first TNF game), and it too “won the week”:
…and you can see how the growth of Prime Video stacks up over time:
I’d add, football on Peacock can do nearly as well on sports streaming as Prime Video. I mean, Peacock—a much smaller streamer than Amazon by either usage or subscribers—had nearly the same average audience. That said, as some folks pointed out, Prime Video’s first Thursday night game was a blowout, so it likely would have seen better numbers, but viewers stopped watching. Notably, the two premiere games did better than most of the games last season, and we’ll see how much that growth trend continues as the season progresses:
So all’s good on streaming, right? The one caveat is that broadcast plus streaming still beats streaming only. For week 1, the NFL delivered an average audience of 21 million viewers across all time slots, which is well above both the streaming-only games. The Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football games also did huge numbers, dwarfing streaming only.
Sort-Of Sports Can’t Replace Real Sports
So that’s the real sports. Now let’s talk not-so-real sports: Chestnut vs. Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef, Netflix’s latest foray into sort-of sports specials. This year, instead of competing in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition (due to a sponsorship dispute), Joey Chestnut signed up for a Labor Day special on Netflix.
It didn’t make any of the ratings charts I track. It didn’t make Netflix’s global charts, either, so it either had less than 2.5 million hours or less than 1.5 million views global.
And I didn’t hear anyone talking about it either. The usual argument for these specials is all the free earned media that Netflix can get, but this rebuts that. I did a Google search a week later, and there were very few articles about Joey Chestnut setting a new record. There were a handful, mostly from the trades or Netflix itself. This matches the Google Trends data. First, here’s a comparison to the WNBA:
You’ll note: the July Fourth hot dog competition on ESPN still out-earned Netflix in terms of buzz. And here’s an unfair comparison to The Olympics and NFL:
This look shows just how big the Olympics actually were, as they actually bested the NFL in terms of search interest.
As for Netflix, this appears to be more on trend than not for Netflix specials. According to the latest Netflix global data drop, aside from The Roast of Tom Brady, every other sort-of sports special has bombed. The Netflix Slam only garnered 1 million viewers. Worldwide. And I bet Netflix shelled out top dollar for Nadal and Alcatraz to appear in it.
Again, nothing replaces live sports.
Television - Streaming Shoots for the Stars
Over the two-week time period of this report, the streamers put out two big new shows.