Thread by @Great_Katzby

🧵Quick Streaming Thread 🧵

Audience engagement—or the viewer conversation and attention surrounding a given title—is NOT a reflection of viewership. But it does help to measure viewer consistency/loyalty and, importantly, title awareness, which can help attract new subscribers. Chatter is free marketing!

According to @Diesel_Labs, which measures audience attention/engagement, these are the top 2021 streaming originals based on engagement and the top '21 streaming break outs (titles that saw dramatic increase in engagement after limited pre-release conversation/hype).

Squid Game (274M hours watched in '21, per @nielsen), WandaVision (121M), Loki (93.7M in first 3 months, per @EntStrategyGuy), and TFATWS (75.2M) are obvious winners. Conversation + Viewership = Total package. Word of Mouth still matters as a growth driver
entertainmentstrategyguy.com/2022/02/04/the…

Again, engagement doesn't = viewership. Arcane never charted on Nielsen's weekly top 10 lists & others like Invincible/What If underscore animation's US viewership ceiling. Yet small but loyal audiences (plus good reviews) are still valuable because library quality helps overall.

One goal is to always attract new demographics of subs. #TheBeatlesGetBack was Disney+'s fifth best title at engaging new audiences, which reflects how awareness is built among different sets of viewers. Appealing to new demos is one reason why #Hamilton was such a success.

Same-day release movies played a big role in attracting engagement/new audience conversation for both #HBOMax and #Peacock. Amazon benefitted from a slew of original movies in '21. We know from 3rd party data how successful many of these films were in viewership/new signups.

From my April '21 story on ZSJL streaming (per @AntennaData). And US viewership for some other titles, per @samba_tv:

GvK: 3.6M opening weekend
TSS: 2.8M
The Tomorrow War: 2.4M
Space Jam: 2.1M

And I had a big thread last week on TWOT's huge success.

observer.com/2021/04/justic…

Investment in originals remains important (Netflix's success w/ #RedNotice & #DontLookUp is a reminder that new-to-screen concepts work better on streaming). But unsurprisingly, familiar & franchise IP was a top driver of engagement (see: Disney+'s Marvel engagement).

Entertainment is a battle for hours in the day. Streaming services wTith low churn rates and high usage rates have more pricing power than their more volatile rivals. Why do you think Netflix always gets away with price hikes with relatively negligible churn?

We know from other third party data firms such as @reelgoodapp, @ParrotAnalytics, and @tvshowtime how valuable social media conversation can be to measuring the audience demand/anticipation for a given titles, as long as chatter is the only metric we're measuring.

Let's avoid falling prey to the Film Twitter Bubble narrative & conflating conversation with broad appeal. But let's also remember the power of Word of Mouth as a discovery tool & the versatile long-term value in developing a loyal & consistently engaged audience.