At least on Netflix, we get around 10 series every month. The streaming giant spends a lot of money on keeping the stream of content flowing. But, is so much effort worth it?
A recent study looked at how much people watch on streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+. It found that even though there are thousands of shows to choose from, most of the time, people only watch a small number of them.
In 2022, there were nearly 1,000 new shows released on these platforms. But guess what? Only about 20 of them were super popular. These top shows got most of the attention from viewers, leaving the rest with very few eyeballs.
The study also found that there’s a big drop in viewership between the top shows and the ones that aren’t as popular. For example, on Disney+, the top 10 shows got a ton of views, while the next 10 got way less. And the shows that didn’t make it to the top 20? They barely got any views at all.
This tells us that maybe making so many new shows wasn’t such a good idea after all. Streaming platforms spent a lot of money making all these shows, for don’t know what reason. But it turns out, having too many shows might have been a bad idea.
Just imagine a situation where the platforms are just busy making series that end up being watched by a handful of people and it doesn’t even have a recall value. It is precisely the case with Netflix and Disney+ in this case.
Another interesting thing the study found is that people tend to watch older shows more than new ones. For example, popular series like “Grey’s Anatomy” are still watched a lot, even years after they first came out. A more apt and recent example would be Suits. New shows, on the other hand, don’t always get watched again once they’ve been seen.
So, what does this all mean? Well, streaming platforms might need to rethink how they make and release new shows. Instead of making tons of new ones, they could focus on making fewer, better shows. This could save them money and make viewers happier in the long run.