It’s official – sort of: viewers would rather watch Daredevil beat up crooks than see Kevin Spacey chew the White House scenery.
A new report from San Diego-based company Luth Research, which surveyed some 2,500 Netflix viewers, said it had determined that nearly 11% of its domestic subscriber base watched at least one of the 13 melee-filled episodes of Daredevil during that show’s first weekend live on the service. Season three of juicy political drama House of Cards attracted 6.5% of viewers, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which retained viewers from week to week better than any of the other shows, attracted 7.3% of domestic watchers. Variety first reported the news.
Netflix keeps its viewer data under lock and key – even the creators don’t know how their shows are doing. But more than one information company has mined users for information about their viewing habits, and it’s looking like the company’s new Marvel show is its most popular offering among its original programs. The success will be closely watched by the traditional media companies.
MoffettNathanson, a research firm that covers media and telecoms, published a note last week called Is Netflix Killing TV? (answer: yes), in which it found that domestic Netflix usage “represented 43% of the quarter’s linear TV viewing decline”. TV usage will continue to drop, analyst Michael Nathanson wrote, and Netflix usage will continue to rise.
Luth’s numbers do not necessarily mean that Daredevil is the most popular show on Netflix. The company streams some of the highest-rated shows on TV, and is filled with library content like sitcoms and police procedurals that don’t make headlines but still attract more viewers than prestige dramas.
In fact, the industry is so curious about what users of the wildly popular service are actually watching that the Nielsen company, whose data is used to sell ads on TV, is departing from its usual practice of mining only its clients for viewer data and will soon begin gathering data on Netflix from its own panel of viewers (which is much larger than Luth’s – about 35,000 people). “That will be the last significant portion of overall television content viewing that we don’t already measure,” Nielsen CEO Mitch Barns told Bloomberg in March.
