Over the course of their young lives, streaming services has chosen to eschew traditional data reporting practices and kept the performances of their original series to themselves. With no advertisers to serve, services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have no business reason to reveal how their shows are performing, other than bragging rights.
But the traditional ad-supported TV industry has railed against that practice, and agents and their clients are definitely interested in knowing how well their shows are doing in order to be able to gauge how much they should be demanding for their services.
Several ratings services have tried to shed insight on how these streaming shows are performing. Earlier this week, Nielsen unveiled its estimates for ratings for a couple of key shows that stream on Netflix and Hulu at its Consumer 360 conference in Las Vegas.
According to Nielsen, Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, produced by Lionsgate, saw 6.7 million people tune in to its season-four premiere when it debuted on the service June 17 and over the next two days. Some 5.9 million stayed around to check out episode two in that timeframe. Those numbers put Orange is the New Black in league with some of cable’s most popular series, and make it the second most-watched series of that week, behind only HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Meanwhile, Seinfeld, which Hulu bought in an off-net deal worth some $125 million, is pulling in 706,000 viewers in the first five days that the episodes are available.
Another key piece of information is that streaming viewers tend to be significantly younger than those who watch traditional TV. Some 44 percent of those who watched the Sony-produced Better Call Saul on Netflix are between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to 24 percent on AMC, where the show airs on basic cable.
Nielsen is tracking the shows via audio files provided to it by the producing studios. Nielsen “listens” to viewership in homes with Nielsen set-top boxes, and grabs the data that way.
READ MORE: The Wall Street Journal, Variety
[Image courtesy of Netflix via The Wall Street Journal]
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