The Nielsens for December 13-19 show (as expected) The Witcher dominates the chart thanks to the release of season 2 — we take a look at all the numbers
Last week Lost in Space held back Hawkeye as The Wheel of Time dropped back, but we made this prediction:
We still predict The Expanse will appear, we’d like to see Hawkeye pick up a better following (it’s a long way behind Loki at this stage) and while Lost in Space should still do well, our money would be on The Witcher
Apart from our fascination with The Expanse, it’s a week where the result was easy to anticipate as Netflix releases its own data before the Nielsens get to conduct their cross-platform audit and publication cycle. Thanks to the global micro-chip shortage, we’ve been unable to get a powerful enough computer to analyse the numbers, so our teams scavenged a job lot of old Betamax recorders with a plan to network them up to produce a parallel processing mesh. Unfortunately a number of the machines still had tapes in, and once rewound were found to contain recordings of a lot of Cheggers Plays Pop and we’ve been unable to get the team to concentrate on this week’s numbers.
Fortunately we also found several episodes of Mike Reid’s Runaround, and used that as a basis for a new random number generator. Meanwhile, back at the data…
The Nielsens
This is the published US data for December 13-19 with our analysis in the columns marked ‘*’.
| Rank | Streamer | Series | #Episodes | Ep length (mins)* | Total Minutes (Millions) | Episode Watches* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netflix | The Witcher | 16 | 60 | 2,191 | 36,516,667 |
| 2 | Disney+ | Hawkeye | 5 | 50 | 580 | 11,600,000 |
| 3 | Netflix | Lost In Space | 28 | 55 | 569 | 10,345,455 |
| 4 | Amazon | The Wheel Of Time | 7 | 60 | 467 | 7,783,333 |
| 5 | Netflix | The Great British Baking Show | 75 | 75 | 292 | 3,893,333 |
| 6 | Netflix | Selling Tampa | 8 | 30 | 243 | 8,100,000 |
| 7 | Netflix | Money Heist | 46 | 50 | 231 | 4,620,000 |
| 8 | Netflix | The Queen Of Flow | 89 | 45 | 218 | 4,844,444 |
| 9 | Netflix | Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous | 37 | 24 | 215 | 8,958,333 |
| 10 | Netflix | Twentysomethings: Austin | 12 | 28 | 185 | 6,607,143 |
The Witcher breaks the two billion minute barrier
With a massive 2.191 billion minutes viewed (just in the US) The Witcher has taken the top spot in style, and with the highest debut week numbers we’ve seen since tracking the Nielsens (ie less than a year!). If you look at the source data produced by Netflix, we find the following:
Globally, The Witcher season 2 clocked up 142,430,000 hours globally and season 1 also made a respectable 49,180,000 hours. That’s a global total of over 190 million hours or over ten billion minutes (10,000,000,000). We can’t quite reconcile the Nielsens with the Netflix data, but it’s big numbers. Is the US only 20% of the audience? It’s possible. Season 2 made the Top 10 in 93 countries. Expect many more seasons!
What else happened?
Hawkeye has picked up, though not to anything exceptional, and it’s a big drop for Lost in Space. Wheel of Time makes up a quartet of cult titles in the top 4, but has also not made any exceptional numbers. No sign of The Expanse, and nice to see Bake Off creeping up the chart.
What can we look forward to?
The Witcher should be top next time round, and the Netflix data points to strong competition from Emily in Paris with its second season arriving (and the show has been renewed for two more seasons). As ever we’ll bring you our unique take, and we look forward to a Christmas surprise as the data will cover December 20-26. See you next time!