How The Witcher’s Viewership Number Changed Between Season 2 and Season 3

Vol. 1 of Netflix’s The Witcher Season 3 starring Henry Cavill, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan premiered on June 29 and already there is much talk about ratings, viewership numbers and other measurements people like. There’s quite a bit of confusion, so here we’ll try to compare the viewership numbers between the first 10 days of Season 2 and Season 3.

First let’s talk about the new and improved Netflix metric

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Netflix’s has always been quite vague when it comes to their viewership numbers. In fact, not only Netflix, but all streamers present different metrics in different ways, which makes comparison extremely difficult. Now, however, Netflix has introduced a new viewership metric that helps with this matter.

In the previous two years, the streamer would only report how many hours a season has been viewed by people globally. That metric was favorable towards seasons that have more hours and less favorable to shorter seasons.

For example, if 10 million people watch two series, one lasting 6 hours, one lasting 10 hours, of course the latter will be ranked higher, even if the same amount of people have watched it. That was quite flawed.

Now, with the new metric, viewed hours are divided by the season runtime, in order to eliminate the unfair advantage longer seasons used to have in the ranking. The result Netflix calls “views”.

Vol. 1 of The Witcher Season 3 saw a 30% viewership drop from Season 2 in first 10 days

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Now let’s get to The Witcher. We’ll take first 10 days of each release and as explained above, the lack of Vol. 2 isn’t affecting the calculation because we divide it by its runtime, so the results are equalized.

The Witcher Season 2 had 310M hours viewed in its first 10 days of release. Divided by its official Netflix runtime (7h41 converted to decimals), we get 41.8M views per the new metric.

Vol. 1 of The Witcher Season 3 had 139.5M hours viewed in its first 11 days of release. Divided by its official Netflix runtime (4h49 converted to decimals), we get 29M views, a 30% drop.

Additionally, The Witcher: Blood Origin has 24.5M views in its first 15 days by the same metric with 98M hours viewed and 4 hours of runtime.

Unfortunately, data for Season 1 is unavailable as it was released before Netflix started releasing viewed hours. At the time it was reported that Season 1 was viewed by 76M households, but that number isn’t convertible to the new metric.

Still, even with all of that, all three seasons of The Witcher are back in Netflix Global Top-10 for English language series, meaning people are watching and rewatching.

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The reasons for this viewership drop can be varied: some wait for Vol. 2 to watch everything all at once, some are upset about the story and production issues (including the Henry Cavill aspect) of The Witcher and decided to drop it, some didn’t even know that it was out due to Netflix’s current state of marketing and many other reasons.

Some parties are quick to call Season 3 a flop, others parties would call it a megahit. The numbers say it’s neither. It’s one of those shows that aren’t quite as popular as they used to be, but are still doing well among their peers on the same platform. As it was said in Chernobyl, “not great, not terrible.”

With Season 4, however, it will be a different picture, but that’s a conversation for another time, 1.5-2 years from now.

Vol. 2 of The Witcher Season 3 will be released on July 27. Stay tuned to Redanian Intelligence and do pop into our Discord server to join in on The Witcher conversation.

The post How The Witcher’s Viewership Number Changed Between Season 2 and Season 3 appeared first on Redanian Intelligence.



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