#SaveWarriorNun News & Data 👼 2023-01-23

What is a successful show?

#SaveWarriorNun

Jan 23, 2023

We've got transcripts of Simon's interview in a variety of different languages so folks can enjoy it:

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Digging Deeper

Let's talk a little bit about a question and a chart, courtesy of the folks in the SWN Discord:

what are the best ways to actually extrapolate Netflix's viewing numbers for Warrior Nun?

Netflix is notoriously closed-mouthed about specifics beyond large aggregate numbers. However, if we want to look at which series COULD be paying off for the streaming giant, there are ways to understand that in a relative sense.

We can obtain, publicly, IMDB data about series, including ratings and votes. Bear in mind, you don't go vote for an IMDB series unless you're actually interested in it or you either loved/hated it (people tend not to give mediocre reviews in general). So it's reasonable to assume that voting volume is a proxy for viewership - after all, it's unlikely you're going to get tons of votes for a show no one watched.

We see this borne out in this chart of the comparative first two seasons of votes for shows:

Stranger Things CLEARLY dominates, followed by The Witcher, and then most recently, Warrior Nun in third place, on a per episode basis.

The full chart showing all seasons is much bigger and uglier, so we'll skip that for now, but you can download IMDB's data yourself if you like.

Next, Statista and MovieWeb.com issued a May 2022 statistic showing which shows were the most expensive to produce on a PER EPISODE basis:

We see Stranger Things topping the charts at 30 million US dollars per episode, followed by The Crown at 13 million US dollars, and so forth.

Warrior Nun doesn't even make the chart, which tells us that the per episode cost is lower than 4 million dollars per episode. Folks in various Discord servers have estimated between 2-3 million dollars per episode.

Alone, these two sets of data are interesting, but when we compare them to each other, we get to some really interesting insights.

If we scale each dataset to percentage values, we can start to make apples to apples comparisons. For example:

Stranger Things represents 46% of the IMDB votes in this set, and 30.5% of the budget. That's pretty clearly a winner. The Witcher represents 19% of the votes in this set of shows, and 10.2% of the budget. That's another winner.

And Warrior Nun? It represents 10% of the votes in this set of shows... and only 3% of the budget.

In finance, we have a term called ROI, return on investment. It's a simple formula - (earned - spent) / spent. ROI tells you whether something is profitable or not, taking into account the costs. When we apply this general idea to these two percentages, we get something LIKE ROI - essentially, inferred viewership against costs.

A show that's "breaking even" would have the same percentage of viewership that it has for money spent. You're getting results commensurate to the spend you're putting in, and your ROI would be 0 - equal amounts of benefits in and out.

A show that's a "failure", where you're spending way more money than you're getting audience/viewership, that number would be negative.

And a show that's a success? The percentage of viewership should be disproportionately higher than the amount of money spent.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us with Warrior Nun being quite possibly the most efficient show in Netflix's arsenal. Inexpensive to produce - one episode of Stranger Things' budget costs as much as an entire season of Warrior Nun - and driving a high percentage of inferred viewership.

Now, are these ACTUAL viewership numbers? No, and until Netflix releases that data, we have no idea what those real numbers are. I don't know about you, but after I watch a show on Netflix, I'm not compelled to immediately go review it on IMDB. There's no call to action to do so, which means the numbers on IMDB are largely organic, especially over many episodes. Thus, I feel they are probably REASONABLY representative of actual viewership. I'm open to someone from Netflix sending along an actual dataset and I will gladly recompute this with real numbers.

The conclusion? A recent article in which a Netflix executive claimed "no successful show has ever been cancelled" must be using some other data for the basis of that judgement, but it's not using numbers that I would imagine every other streaming service would find valuable - viewership and cost to produce.

Today's Data

All data below is as of 19:30 UTC-0.

Today's NETFLIX FREE WARRIOR NUN is doing well, coming out swinging especially with some of the recent coverage.

In the big picture for Twitter volume, yesterday topped out around 89K despite it being an off day, and we’re on track to exceed that today.

Key article coverage is off to a roaring start, only 2 days into the week. Keep clicking those links!

Your Attention Please

A reminder: One of the major aims of the campaign is to get more mainstream media coverage. Mainstream media publishers don’t care about retweets - they make their money on page views and even compensate writers based on how many people read their articles. The more we help them, the more they help cover us.

Please click on the link to these news articles: