Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
THE SUCCESS FACTOR When it comes to the question, what is a success, "there are a lot of different ways to answer," says Fuhrer of Nielsen's calculations. "One is total volume. I start off every week when I look at the top 10, and I say, okay, what programs were over a billion minutes viewed. That just gives a bit of a seat of the pants. If something's over a billion minutes, it's a big deal." This, of course, is an obvious determination, and there are always outliers. Noting how the sweet spot for streaming is nabbing the 18-24 audience, Fuhrer says: "My favorite example is when The Crown first released. I got the data back from The Crown, and I was like, wow, this is a really undesirable audience. Everybody that's watched The Crown is over 55, you know. Then I thought for a second. If this program is reaching out to a completely new audience, isn't that a success?" Parrot produces a weekly and monthly ranking of TV shows demand across all television platforms for the U.S. For the month of April of this year (see graphic), for example, SpongeBob SquarePants sat at the top with a number of 66.4x. "It's no surprise that SpongeBob ranks at the top if you think about the ubiquity of all the SpongeBob videos and memes," explains Engelhardt, "and the many more signals such as researching, P2P consumption, social signals, and so on, that audiences can engage with. These expressions of demand, weighted and aggregated, net the total demand for SpongeBob, which is then indexed against the average demand for all shows in the market to arrive at the demand score. SpongeBob's score means that it is 66.4 times more in demand than the average show in the U.S. Pretty huge!" In this particular analysis, shows fall into four buckets: Average, Good, Outstanding, Exceptional. A score of 66.4x is exceptional. This information can be used to measure a show's performance and ranking relative to other shows, regardless of which platform or network the shows are available on. F E AT U R E INFLUENCING STRATEGIES The hardest thing for creators is that they, for the most part, create from a place of love and excitement for their subjects. Streaming platforms, on the other hand, acquire and retain content based almost solely on numbers. No calculation is a sure thing, but these numbers determine their decisions. And even when there's an exception to a rule, that information can be valuable. It's possible for content with a lot of demand to not have comparable viewership numbers. People are engaging with it online, but for some reason they're not watching it. This lets a streaming platform "identify shows that are either being under-monetized or would be better suited for a different strategy," says Engelhardt. Then there are the exceptions in the other direction. "Squid Game did zero advertising," she says, "and it just blew up the scene." She notes that different shows require different strategies, from the way they're recommended to the way they're marketed and even to the way they're released. To binge release, weekly release, or hybrid release—that is the question. "If you have 20 episodes to release and you decide to do them weekly, what you'll see in our demand metric are spikes at each new episode's air date. Then you'll start to see demand decay. If you have a binge release and you dump all the episodes at once, there's a huge spike initially, and then it's interesting," says Engelhardt. "Does demand decay faster? Do shows stay relevant longer because new audiences can find them all at one time? If you're ultimately trying to maximize the demand of your show, how do you do that, what's the best strategy? " Graphic courtesy of Parrot Analytics. 36 KEYFRAME BELOW AVERAGE 24.4% AVERAGE 64.1% GOOD 8.6% OUTSTANDING 2.7% EXCEPTIONAL 0.2% Spongebob Squarepants 66.43x Attack on Titan 46.80x The Simpsons 40.84x Rick And Morty 36.99x My Hero Academia 36.99x South Park 36.88x PAW Patrol 33.13x The Owl House 30.37x Family Guy 29.03x Dragon Ball Z 28.78X 0.01x 0 1x 2x Difference from the demand of the average title in the market (1x) Top 10 animation shows demand, shown within the demand distribution of all TV shows in the U.S. in April 2022. 8x 32x