A day later, Nielsen’s weekly rankings of streaming titles — which lag by about a month — showed Jupiter’s Legacy as the No.
Jupiter’s Legacy drew about 650 million minutes more viewing time than The Irregulars over its first two weeks, but both shows crashed in week three: The Irregulars fell by 58 percent, and Jupiter’s Legacy plummeted 60 percent.
Nielsen, collecting streaming data via a subset of its traditional national panel, has provided some light where there was previously very little: Prior to its inauguration of weekly rankings in summer 2020, hard viewership data for a given title was vanishingly hard to come by.
But the value is pretty limited,” says Matthew Ball, a former Amazon Studios exec who now leads venture firm EpyllionCo.
None of the services, including Nielsen, can offer full insight into how cost-efficient a show is — a bloated budget for Jupiter’s Legacy has been cited as a key reason for its swift end — or whether a series drives user subscription or retention.
The rankings have also shown that weekly episode releases can pay dividends: Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision steadily built viewership over their runs, as opposed to a more pronounced rise and fall for binge releases that are genre like Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga, which dropped more than 70 percent in its third week and was out of the top 10 by week four.
Sources tell THR that more buy-in from streamers for what Nielsen is doing could mean better insights in the form of weekly rankings that include more outlets and arrive sooner than they do now.
Hastings praised the finding in The New York Times, signaling that the days when he and other execs were dismissive of Nielsen are waning and their chilly relationship could be warming.