Reacher doesn’t seem that concerned by your gun, bro.
Courtesy of Prime Video
Something cool happened in the realm of streaming ratings this week. I realize that’s an unbelievably nerdy thing to say, but it’s true. And since you have all signed up to have this newsletter reach your inboxes, I’m betting on you agreeing with me to at least some degree.
What happened was that Nielsen accelerated the release timing for its weekly streaming ratings. Since it started sending out weekly streaming numbers in 2020, the charts have had a four-week lag time. Last week’s charts, released on Sept. 10, were for the week of Aug. 10-16. Some data is better than no data, especially in streaming, but four weeks was an awfully long time to wait.
As of today, though, Nielsen has cut the lag time to about a week and a half. Streaming top 10s will come out 11 days after the end of a Monday-to-Sunday Nielsen week; to catch up, the company released three weeks’ worth of charts, with the most recent one for the week ending Sept. 6.
Also, as Vulture’s Joe Adalian (a Data Stream subscriber!) reported Wednesday, Nielsen is also giving its clients daily streaming data reports, whereas before they were weekly. The company won’t share those numbers directly, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if some streamer does in the future when one of its shows or movies puts up a big number. In fact, it’s already happened once: Apple TV touted the viewing totals for Ted Lasso on the day season four premiered in August. The 200 million minutes the show got on its premiere day, Aug. 5, were part of week where it rolled up 866 million minutes of watch time.
The faster release times might also help streamers avoid bad optics from time to time. I’m thinking about The Boroughs — which Netflix canceled in June, a day before its first set of Nielsen streaming numbers showed a strong premiere week in the U.S. Had the shorter lag time been in place then, Netflix would have at least been able to point to a substantial drop in the show’s U.S. numbers (as well as in its internal worldwide rankings) when it announced the cancellation.
It would be great if Nielsen can get to a point where it releases its weekly streaming totals as quickly as it does on-air ratings; those usually land the Wednesday after the previous week. But this is a big step forward.
Speaking of big steps: Thanks to the 15 new signups who have pushed The Data Stream past 100 subscribers in the past 24 hours. I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has subscribed so far. Tell your friends, click the ads in these posts (I know, but I earn a dollar or two each time you do), and if you can, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Since Nielsen released three weeks’ worth of streaming top 10s Thursday, I’m not going to make 12 tables showing each week’s breakdown. This email would be longer than five CVS receipts taped together if I did.
Instead, I totaled every show and film in the respective top 10 categories (overall, original series, library series and movies) and arrived at at top 10 for each over those three weeks. The full top 10 for each category is below, and then next week we’ll get back to normal.
You’ll notice one fluky thing in the charts: SpongeBob SquarePants has different viewing time totals in the overall rankings and in the library series top 10. It only made the overall list twice in those three weeks, but it stayed in the library rankings all three weeks.
The aggregated top 10s for Aug. 17-Sept. 6 are below.