One of the main mysteries of streaming series is exactly what their audiences are. The platforms are not exactly transparent when it comes to making them known -and that when they do, which often doesn’t even happen-, but now Nielsen has shed some light on last year’s data. And ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ has not been exactly in a good place.
As you will remember, Amazon Prime Video itself puffed its chest a few weeks ago saying that the first season had been “unprecedented success“, but already then it became clear that ‘The rings of power’ It was a long way from being able to compete with many Netflix series. Nielsen data on audiences in the United States have confirmed this point.
In the Top 15 by the hair
According to Nielsen, ‘The Rings of Power’ had 9.4 billion minutes watched in the United States last year, which only allowed him to occupy the position 15 among the most viewed streaming original series of the year. The list in question is almost completely dominated by Netflix with 13 series on this platform.
For example, ‘Stranger Things’ added a whopping 52,000 million minutes. It is true that the series created by the duffer brothers accumulates the data of 34 episodes, but even if we mistakenly assume that all of them were seen equally, we get a much higher average than that of ‘The rings of power’ (1,529 million minutes per episode compared to 1,175 million for the series from Prime Video).
Regarding the premiere series last year, ‘Wednesday’ stands as the high achiever by adding 18,600 million with the same number of episodes as ‘The rings of power’ and in less time available -there the average per episode of the Netflix series shoots up to 2,325 million minutes per episode-.
Other great hits from Netflix last year such as ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ -seventh place with 13.4 billion minutes- or ‘Who is Anna?’ -ninth place with 12,900 million minutes- they also surpass ‘Los anillos de poder’, which It’s not even the series with the best Prime Video data.
That honor belongs to ‘The Boys’, which appears in eleventh place with 10.6 billion minutes. However, there it is more than likely that the additional viewings of its first two seasons have raised it above ‘The rings of power’, since the difference between the number of episodes available -24 compared to 8- is much more notable than the one that exists in audiences.
In case you have been curious about more, I leave you below an image that includes the Top 15 streaming original series throughout 2022 in United States:
In addition, Nielsen has also released a list with the 15 most viewed productions in streaming throughout the past year, where it is striking that ‘Enchantment’ is the only film with a spectacular 27.4 billion minutes:
In Espinof: