Nielsen has been gathering data about Netflix viewership for almost a year via its SVOD Content Ratings, a syndicated service that measures content from subscription video on demand services. At present, however, the service only provides ratings for Netflix content on connected TV devices like Roku, Apple TV, video game consoles and smart TVs (which accounts for around 75 percent of SVOD viewing).
For the first time, Nielsen stacked Netflix's biggest series and movie premieres from over the past year against one another to compare their average audience viewership during the first day. Stranger Things dominated its competition, with three times as much premiere day viewing (almost 25 million, across all Season 2 episodes) as its closest competitor, Marvel's Defenders. (Again, this data only represents TV viewing during the premiere day, not total ratings to date.)
"It's a huge event that appealed to a very broad group of people," said Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen's svp of product leadership.
Stranger Things was also the clear leader in reach: 8.9 million people watched at least six minutes of one episode during its premiere day. The Will Smith movie Bright had a premiere day reach of 5.4 million, while The Crown tallied 1.6 million. The Cloverfield Paradox, which Netflix dropped
immediately after the Super Bowl, had a 1.0 million reach on its first day of release.
Fuhrer noted that most of Netflix's biggest debuts during the past year had wildly different audience compositions, more evidence of the streaming service's efforts to be all things to all people:
