Pictures: Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending November 17th, 2024. This week, most of the focus is undoubtedly on the big fights that took place live (at least for some) on Friday night. Let’s break down all the numbers Netflix has put out thus far and check in with Arcane and some of the other big debuts for last week, including a new Christmas hit, Hot Frosty.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from November 11th, 2024, to November 17th, 2024, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. Is Cobra Kai Doing Well? We Don’t Know!
I am sorry to report that the numbers for Cobra Kai Season 6B are unusable since Netflix includes views of episodes from the previous part in the weekly total. This wouldn’t be an issue if the first part hadn’t been released three months ago, but as it stands, I can’t make anything out of this data. It doesn’t matter, though, as it is the final season, with the last part being released in February 2025.
2. Arcane Season 2 Viewership Lags Slightly Behind Season 1 In Week 2
The numbers for the second batch of Arcane Season 2 episodes finally provide a point of comparison with Season 1 figures, and it’s not as disastrous as I had imagined last week. The drop-off compared to Season 1 for the same batch of episodes and observation period is relatively small.
3. Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
It was last week’s main attraction, and of course, it’s an event—at least according to Netflix, which has self-proclaimed the Paul vs. Tyson fight as the most-streamed sports event in history.
Let’s try to look beyond the rather laughable announcement, likely filled with asterisks like “streamed but not necessarily watched,” and focus instead on the myriad of figures Netflix released for the occasion. This fight serves as a prime example of the complexity of measuring streaming audiences.
What figures did Netflix share for these fights? Yes, I say fights because there were four matches, including the Paul-Tyson fight.
- 60M accounts watched the program: This figure marks a return to Netflix’s old method of sharing audience data, which only indicates a program’s “reach” but doesn’t reveal how many people actually watched the matches in full or which matches in particular. That’s 60M accounts out of 280M existing ones.
- 65M simultaneous streams during the Paul-Tyson match: This is a relatively new metric for Netflix. It refers to simultaneous streams, which don’t indicate time spent watching but rather the technical load on the platform. This could explain the streaming interruptions and slowdowns during the event, at least in the US, where they had to handle 38M simultaneous streams. In other parts of the world, the fight was much easier to follow, likely because it aired at night and fewer people watched it live.
108M average viewers per minute for the Paul-Tyson fight (125M over the weekend): This is another new figure, not from Netflix but from a mix of third-party sources in the US (like TVision Data, which I’d never heard of) and key markets where Netflix operates, extrapolated globally. This is the figure most media will highlight, and the one Netflix emphasizes the most, but it has the weakest methodological foundation and feels a bit arbitrary.
46.6M EVCs/“views” over the weekend, or 224.6M hours viewed: This is my favorite Netflix metric because it’s simple and allows comparison with three years of historical data. However, it’s not a viewer count; it’s an arbitrary scale for comparing programs. The main limitation is that it includes hours viewed for all four fights, not just the Paul-Tyson one. It’s a shame Netflix didn’t split the four fights into separate programs, as that would have provided clearer data on the main fight’s performance.
Which of these metrics is the most reliable? Which one deserves to be shared?
You know my opinion, so let’s compare this launch using the EVC metric. First, it’s by far the most-watched live event on Netflix. There aren’t any comparable events, so let’s broaden the scope and compare it to the best TV series launches (as the fights are categorized as TV, not films, and with 289 minutes in total, it’s closer to a series than a movie).
The fights rank below the launches of Stranger Things Season 4B and Money Heist Season 5A in terms of EVCs but still perform at a very high level, especially since the fights aired in the evening in the US, making it more of a two-day launch than a three-day one. It’s a success by every available metric, but for each metric, the comparisons are lacking, so we cannot really grasp how much of a success it is – that’s at least until the NFL games, anyway!
4. Hot Frosty Is Another Netflix Christmas Hit
Netflix’s Christmas movie cycle continues with Hot Frosty, where a snowman comes to life. Yes, you can’t make this up, but the audience seems to be there, as the film’s launch is nearly on par with Meet Me Next Christmas, which was released last week, scoring 16M CVEs in 5 days.
5. Return of the King: Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley isn’t drawing much attention on Netflix this week, as the documentary dedicated to him has had a very poor start—only 3.3M CVEs in 5 days—one of the worst debuts of the year.
6. The Lost Children
A documentary off to an excellent start is The Lost Children, the Colombian film that tells the true story of four children’s survival in the jungle. With 7.9M CVEs in 4 days, it’s the best debut ever for an international documentary released on a Thursday.
7. Sisters’ Feud
The (very long) Mexican series Sisters’ Feud has had an average start for a 2024 Mexican series released on a Wednesday, with 3.3M CVEs. However, its length will likely help it maintain decent performance in the coming weeks.
That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.