The Witcher season 2

The Witcher season 2 dominates the Nielsens on release

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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 SpaceWheel 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?

Emily in Paris
Emily is back in Paris

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!