The Nielsen figures for the bulk of the 2021 festive season are out, and amidst a raft of strong numbers, it’s Cobra Kai for the win — we take a deeper look
Last week we were looking at the success of The Witcher, Emily in Paris, Hawkeye and more. We pointed to Netflix’s own data for Cobra Kai and wondered about some other changes, and new shows such as Stay Close. The Nielsens for 27 December – 2 January are out, several shows break the billion minutes barrier and there’s plenty to discuss.
Before we do, an update on our data sciences division. This week they were given access to a legendary supercomputer by a group of rogue mice. While setting it up to analyse the Nielsen data, they accidentally erased the results of a calculation that had been running for very nearly seven and a half million years. On the grounds nobody would notice after all this time, they set the answer to a random value. Fingers crossed it wasn’t important.
On to the data…
The Nielsen data
As ever, this is US audited data, runs a few weeks behind and we add the columns marked ‘*’.
| Rank | Streamer | Series | #Episodes | Ep length (mins)* | Total Minutes (Millions) | Episode Watches* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netflix | Cobra Kai | 40 | 34 | 2,423 | 71,264,706 |
| 2 | Netflix | The Witcher | 16 | 60 | 1,827 | 30,450,000 |
| 3 | Netflix | Emily In Paris | 20 | 30 | 1,110 | 37,000,000 |
| 4 | Amazon | The Wheel Of Time | 8 | 60 | 630 | 10,500,000 |
| 5 | Disney+ | Hawkeye | 6 | 50 | 539 | 10,780,000 |
| 6 | Netflix | Queer Eye | 52 | 50 | 466 | 9,320,000 |
| 7 | Netflix | Lost In Space | 28 | 55 | 452 | 8,218,182 |
| 8 | Disney+ | The Book Of Boba Fett | 1 | 39 | 389 | 9,974,359 |
| 9 | Netflix | Stay Close | 8 | 45 | 349 | 7,755,556 |
| 10 | Netflix | The Great British Baking Show | 75 | 75 | 338 | 4,506,667 |
Cobra Kai takes the win
With over 2.4 billion minutes, Cobra Kai takes the #1 position, much as we expected. This is the fourth season and if we look at the episode watches column, this is a lot of people watching 10 episodes (they won’t all just have watched the new season, this is just by way of giving some scale.
What else happened?
If we stick with episodes watched, the Book of Boba Fett number suggests nearly 10 million US fans watched the fist episode once. That’s impressive if we consider the Cobra Kai number is only around 7 million watching the whole of season 4 (which as we said above is just one possibly scenario).
Stay Close pops into the chart (and has done very well with UK audiences, not surprising given it’s a UK show). Overall plenty of big numbers, obviously a lot of watching in the last week of the year.
What can we look forward to?
If we look at just Netflix (we don’t have any other reference point), it would appear the top of the Nielsens next time will look a little like:
Cobra Kai
Stay Close
The Witcher
Emily in Paris
Manifest
Queer Eye
We suspect Wheel of Time and Boba Fett to also feature. Whatever happens, we’ll bring our regular analysis.