Presenting our regular special edition from the the Entertainment Strategy Guy, our anonymous showbiz statistics guru and analyst.
Everyone talks about how executives in tech companies use data to make decisions, and yet the entire journalism ecosystem that covers them thrives off doing the opposite: using single data points to draw huge conclusions.
Lately, we’re drowning in headlines like these:
My goal isn’t a hot take that Squid Game isn’t popular. It’s massive. It’s Netflix’s biggest season one yet and maybe its most valuable series of all time. An important question to ask now is: is Squid Game a foreign language market anomaly or the most successful example of a growing trend everyone should leap aboard?
This column will look at the hard numbers around how all international originals perform for Netflix and take a stab at the following:
– How popular is Squid Game in the U.S.?
– How popular are international/foreign language titles in the U.S.?
– What can we draw from this?
First answer: Duh, Squid Game is a Hit
To start, Squid Game is Netflix’s self-reported most popular show globally, with a reported 142 million people watching in the first 28 days. (Up from an earlier reported 111 million.) A leak last week revealed that Netflix believes Squid Game will generate $890 million in value.
Second, we just received the second batch of Nielsen data for the second week of Squid Game’s release. Squid Game had a slow burn start and didn’t make the Top Ten in its opening weekend, but Nielsen revealed that 3.4 million folks watched it. This week, that jumped an order of magnitude to 31.2 million. Here’s that performance in context of the top streaming Originals released to date:
We’ll have to see how it performs over the next 3-4 weeks to know if it can match something like Manifest or Bridgerton in the U.S. How high could it go? When I want a quick gauge for popularity, I turn to Google Trends. Yes, Squid Game dwarfs some recent launches:
And according to Google, it holds up to the biggest shows of the last five years:
As I’ve seen before, when a show goes viral, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a similarly-sized increase in viewership. That’s likely the case here.
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